Un visa pour Paris

Sibylle Bergemann

Paris, 1979, 1982 und 1990er Jahre

During the GDR era, Sibylle Bergemann traveled twice to Paris. She visits museums and art institutions and takes impressive black-and-white photographs. Both times, the trip is associated with an arduous procedure, as it requires official permission and a visa. Bergemann’s Paris pictures are of bitter melancholy. They bear witness to the “view of beautiful sadness” – as Sibylle Bergemann described her own photographic gaze.

Ute Mahler

Paris, 1979 and 1981

Paris is a place of longing, and it always has been. This was also true for the young photographer Ute Mahler, for whom Paris seemed almost unattainable in GDR times. But in 1978 she wins the main prize at the Cologne “photokina” trade fair, which allows her to travel to Paris for nine days if she so chooses – but this requires a visa, for which she has to fight for months. In Paris, she photographs more intensively than ever before. Her camera helps her to overcome the felt distance to the foreign world.

Maurice Weiss

Paris, 1990

January 1990: The Berlin Wall has fallen, but Germany has not yet been reunited. Upon the invitation of the French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, 200 artists from the GDR travel to Paris for a week with an East German passport to participate in the exhibition “L’autre Allemagne hors les murs” in the “Villette”. The young photography student Maurice Weiss accompanies East German punk and rock bands outside the “Villette” to concerts, photo shootings and fashion shows.

Ute Mahler

Künstler:innenporträts, Paris, 1990

January 1990: The Berlin Wall has fallen, but Germany has not yet been reunited. Upon the invitation of the French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, 200 artists from the GDR travel to Paris for a week with an East German passport to participate in the exhibition “L’autre Allemagne hors les murs” in the “Villette”. Ute Mahler, herself among the guests, portrays the GDR artists and colleagues present in the “Villette”.

Harald Hauswald

La Villette, Paris, 1990

January 1990: The Berlin Wall has fallen, but Germany has not yet been reunited. Upon the invitation of the French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, 200 artists from the GDR travel to Paris for a week with an East German passport to participate in the exhibition “L’autre Allemagne hors les murs” in the “Villette”. Harald Hauswald focuses on the happenings in the exhibition hall, documents performances and takes photographs during the official reception at the Élysée Palace.