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1/3/2007

Portrait: Berlin

Moving Gallery, Omaha

Contemporary Photography and Video Art from Berlin

curated by Matthias Harder

Stefanie Bürkle, Daniela Comani, Nina Fischer/Maroan El Sani, Oliver Godow, Armin Häberle, Frank Hülsbömer, Jens Liebchen, Wiebke Loeper, Gerhard Kassner, Christian Rothmann, Mariana Vassileva, Brigitte Waldach

Soon two decades will have passed since the Berlin Wall fell, the line of demarcation between East and West, symbolically concentrated in the former front-line city. Since the reunification, Berlin has changed radically. Almost the whole social structure was called into question; the result is a politically, intellectually and architectonically transformed city. Artists and gallerists from all over the world have settled in the innumerable factory buildings, especially in the formerly Eastern part of the city, and they transform Berlin into a huge site of production and exchange of contemporary art, which is unparalleled. Numerous photographers have accompanied those processes of change - and had a share in shaping it visually.

In this compilation, the photographic view is focussed on the people and their spaces. Oliver Godow searches for the traces of the ephemeral in the city's interiors, in timeless, utopian enclosures full of Beckettian absurdity. Stefanie Bürkle looks for strange façade elements which stand around the Potsdamer Platz area. These architectural models were placed there to be choosen by the architects which came to the German capital by the end of the 1990s.

Frank Hülsbömer finds architectural structures beyond the new urban facadelike aspect, for instance inside Schinkel's former "Bauakademie" Unter den Linden, which still is in large parts a mere scaffolding with superimposed foil-facade and is located opposite the old City Palace, or rather the "Palast der Republik" (Palace of the Republic), which is in the process of being dismantled. This former palace, the prestige building of the perished GDR par excellence, is the theme of the video work by Nina Fischer and Maroan El Sani, who during the demolishing work look on two film tracks into the inside and, in parallel, through the dirty panes into the urban outside.

Jens Liebchen shows the discussion about the two existing city airports, as well as the new major airport in Schönefeld at the Southern city limit, in his own particular way of artistic documentation: a careful approach towards the radical, urban change, which is hinted at, but which is still far from taking actually place. Armin Häberle occasionally also directs his photographic focus at airports: he shows state visits and other official events in long exposed pictures. The protagonists actually at the centre have erased themselves through the long exposure time.

A city like Berlin - which, in the meantime, turned into a myth again worldwide - is not only represented by buildings or politics, but also by the people who live and work in it. Wiebke Loeper and Mariana Vassileva thematize very personal, even intimate themes of growing up in and comign closer to Berlin: Loeper with her photographic work "Moll 31", a confrontation of pictures shortly before the demolition of her tenement and childhood pictures taken of the same place. Vassileva shows in her video the two cities of Berlin and New York from very close by, shortly after her emigration from Sofia to the German capital. Also Daniela Comani, an Italian artist living in Berlin, remains personal in her black and white photographical series with the title "Eine glückliche Ehe" (A happy marriage), in which she adopts the male as well as the female part.

Gerhard Kassner as official photographer of the Berlinale looks the international actors and directors, who visit the city for the festival, in the face. Christian Rothmann unites in his picture series "you and me", which he creates on all continents as well as in his hometown Berlin, in each case an atmospheric, abstract picture of urban live as well as a portrait of someone who in turn holds a portrait of the photographer into the camera, occasionally also in front of Berlin sights.

Brigitte Waldach, finally, in various ways conciliates those two realms, the places and people in Berlin: on an empty attic of a historical building, everyday objects are arranged peculiarly. In front of this scenery, the Berlin actress Fritzi Haberlandt acts in two roles: as girl in a dress she has grown out of, and as adult woman, who sketches text passages from Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina on the walls; a surreal, claustrophobic scenery emerges.

Moving Gallery
405 South 11th Street - Omaha, Nebraska
Hours: Tues-Sat 11:30-2 p.m. and 5:00-7:00 p.m.

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