Kontinent – In search of Europe

Sibylle Bergemann

Paris, 1979–1982

Paris is, and always has been, a destination many dream of. Sibylle Bergemann, a cofounder of OSTKREUZ who died in 2010, traveled to the city on the Seine many times: twice before the Iron Curtain fell, in the years 1979 and 1982, and then many times afterward. She and her fellow photographer friends founded the OSTKREUZ agency in Paris in 1990. The photographer left her hometown of Berlin only to find the familiar abroad. Her pictures of Paris are tinged with tart melancholy. The dog in the cemetery, the lady and her wine glass, the girls in the parks — Bergemann’s Paris is neither magnificent nor loud. It belongs to the people who inhabit the city. She pays close attention to it.

A vision of beautiful sorrow: that is how Bergemann herself described her photographic view of the exterior world, which also always alluded to the interior. In preparation for these trips, Bergemann learned to speak French; she wanted to be involved and to understand. Her photographs of Paris, timeless in their yearning for boundlessness and affection, give lively evidence of events experienced by a European woman who was a citizen of the world.

Jörg Brüggemann

EUROVISION, 2017–2020

Jörg Brüggemann has travelled throughout Europe to photograph people exercising their rights to freedom of speech and freedom of peaceful assembly. In his large-format portraits that run through the entire exhibition space like flags, he lifts the individual out of the crowd, thus turning individuals into representatives and figures with which the viewer can identify. Brüggemann shows Europeans, regardless of whether they are demonstrating for or against the values Europe stands for.

Espen Eichhöfer

Papa, Gerd, and the Northman, 2017–2020

In his work, Espen Eichhöfer focuses on his personal understanding of home by turning to his Norwegian family and his birthplace in the remote forests of Norway. The individual images condense into a narrative about the experience of one’s own origins and reflect his doubts about a consistent concept of home. At the same time, they are a reflection on issues such as national belonging and the nationalism that is currently reemerging in Europe. Eichhöfer grew up on the lower Rhine and lives in Berlin.

Sibylle Fendt

Holzbachtal, nothing, nothing, 2015–2018

Sibylle Fendt portrays male refugees at a remote accommodation facility in the Black Forest. She spent three years going back and forth to the Holzbachtal to accompany the refugees throughout their monotonous days. They risked a great deal to get to Germany. Nature is the only thing around them that changes. Their hopelessness is reinforced by the lonely silence of the Black Forest and indirectly tells of the enticements and disappointments of the “myth of Europe”.

Johanna-Maria Fritz

The Most Powerful Witch of Europe, 2018–2020

Johanna-Maria Fritz accompanies Mihaela Minca, the most powerful witch in Romania. This is a traditional profession in Mihaela’s family: both her mother and her grandmother were witches. She, her daughters and her daughter-in-law now run a flourishing business. From love spells to enchantments, the witches offer a vast array of services, and they receive inquiries from all over the world via the internet. The skill of a witch is also an expression of female strength in an everyday culture dominated by men.

Annette Hauschild

The helpers, 2016–2018

Human rights and solidarity – Annette Hauschild travels to the borders of Europe to examine these European ideals in photographs. In situational portraits, the artist focuses on actors who practise these fundamental values in their concrete actions – from Christian and political activists to volunteer refugee workers in the ongoing migration flows into Turkey, Greece, France and Germany. Annette Hauschild creates a monument to them without heroising them.

Harald Hauswald

Railroad Ticket – Tracking the Orient Express, 2018

In 2018, Harald Hauswald used an Interrail ticket for seniors to travel the old route of the legendary Orient Express, much of which runs parallel to the Balkan Route. Starting in London, he took the TGV to Paris and then continued on through Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to Istanbul. He took more than ten thousand pictures on this trip, all on his camera phone. The mobile phone as a camera – technologically limited, but fast and flexible – became Hauswald’s entry ticket to what was for him a new world.

Heinrich Holtgreve

For Unto Every One That Hath Shall Be Given, 2016–2020

Spain and Great Britain are nearly a thousand kilometers apart, and since Brexit they are no longer linked to each other through the EU. Nonetheless, they share a common border. In the extreme southwest of Europe, the continent’s challenges crystallize on the cliffs that jut up out of the ocean.

Gibraltar is a place of narrow streets that offers little room for people but many virtual spaces for business. Visitors must first cross La Línea de la Concepción, a kind of Spanish barbican for the British enclave. While Gibraltar is a booming magnet for tourism and tax evaders, a third of the people in La Línea are unemployed. While the profits of online casinos flow to Gibraltar, drugsmuggling ships land in the hinterlands of La Línea.

It is rare that the inequality of late European capitalism—which usually only takes the form of numbers and statistics, sociology books and political speeches—appears as obviously as
it does here on the heels of Europe.

It is here that Heinrich Holtgreve has taken photographs that are sometimes romantic, sometimes sobering, and every now and then ironic.

Tobias Kruse

Jaywick, 2016–2020

The former seaside resort of Jaywick was once a summer residence for London workers who had achieved a modest level of wealth. A long social descent followed: In 2015, the British authorities declared Jaywick to be the poorest place in England. The lives of its inhabitants are shaped by crime, drug addiction and social decline. In his series, Tobias Kruse focuses on the fringes of society.

Ute Mahler und Werner Mahler

On the rivers, 2019–2020

Every river flows into the sea. It is this characteristic that defines the various types of streams, some of them thousands of kilometers long, along which Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler traveled. Rivers are natural experiences, places of longing, arteries of life. Rivers connect and divide; they are transportation routes and boundaries. And every river in Europe carries memories of wars and crises within it.

Nevertheless, wherever you go — on the Rhine or the Danube, the Elbe, the Volga, or the Po — people travel along rivers. Life takes place on their banks: repose or distraction, defense and exchange, between cultures, religions, families, systems. And even though people have always tried to subject the rivers to their wills, they never lose their power and fascination.

Dawin Meckel

The wall, 2017/2018

Money and the neoliberalism that has swept across Europe and around the globe have cultivated the same kind of architecture, the same insignia of power, whether in the City of London or in any other financial quarter in the world.

Dawin Meckel shows an urban landscape that blocks any view of the horizon with high walls and façades. People who can afford it are protected by these walls, and also immured behind them. They identify each other by their dress code: the men wear tailored suits, ties, and expensive shoes, while the few women are clad in business suits and pumps. All of them flaunt a kind of hectic flurry of activity that is paused for only a few seconds to take a deep breath. Everyone else has to stay out; the best they can do is to play the role of the fleeting visitor.

Thomas Meyer

Territory, since 2017

An impression in the insulation of an orangered wall. Logs arranged in rectangular piles in a grassy depression. A hedge behind a metal fence is being cut. Paint flaking off concrete, or the remains of poster on metal? Leaves in the water, or the lights of a city in the darkness? Or are they stars? These harmless moments, trivial shots, and marginal surfaces seem to have hardly anything to do with each other. Yet they capture a fragile sense of security: moments in which it becomes clear that certainties have faded.

Thomas Meyer’s pictures open up much room for interpretation and associations, unfore seen thoughts and feelings in a period of change, when identities are blurring, and clichés are no longer supportable. His work is full of free associations that will not and cannot provide any answers. His oeuvre is itself an inquiry.

Frank Schinski

The right attitude, since 2017

Capitalism has been the dominant economic model in Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain at the latest. Its success is uncontestable, and it has more or less kept its promise of prosperity in various countries. Having a job assures the individual of survival, freedom, and social status. Frank Schinski has long been examining the working world and has created several photographic series on the topic.

In his current project, The Right Attitude, he follows a variety of job application processes in different European countries. He observes participants at job fairs, job interviews, auditions, or in assessment centers, who fall into what is an apparently firmly defined kind of choreography of imaginary expectations. The appointments, places, and procedures seem to be standardized, normalized, and as uniform as the applicants themselves, who are supposed to be tested, judged, evaluated, and categorized in accordance with a particular economic point of view. Schinski’s field of vision focuses on the interactions between the working world and the individual that determine large portions of the latter’s personal life.

Jordis Antonia Schlösser

The Unexpected Generation – New Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, 2016–2018

A young woman amid the weathered tombstones in a cemetery in Łódź. A wedding in Kraków. A Hassidic school in Kyiv. A summer camp for teens in Sanok, in southeast Poland, formerly a lively shtetl. Jordis Antonia Schlösser went on the search for Jewish life in Poland today — and found much more than just the traces of the old culture destroyed by the Holocaust. Poland and Ukraine, once the heartlands of European Judaism, are experiencing a cautious, tentative Renaissance in Jewish life, a life that barely existed in Poland for decades. The few survivors of the Holocaust who did not leave the country during the communist era often kept their Jewish identity a secret, out of fear. Only now are increasing numbers of young people discovering that they have Jewish roots.

It is the “unexpected” generation, as they are known in Poland. They do research and make inquiries, rediscover old rituals; they find each other, even though it is sometimes difficult. They are experiencing the euphoria of a new beginning, a new sense of community once thought to have been forgotten. But they are also experiencing a growing sense of nationalism and antisemitism, especially in Poland. Schlösser’s photographs welcome the viewer as a guest in a mostly unfamiliar world, one that everyone thought had been lost.

Ina Schoenenburg

Związki, 2016–2020

The flat landscape is harsh and melancholy in its beauty. But it is also a significant place in European history. While the traces of wars and persecution, of forced resettlement, of three divisions of Poland seem to have been erased on both sides of the Oder River, they are inscribed in the landscape and the façades.

All of this can be seen in Ina Schoenenburg’s pictures. We see faces that tell of the promise of a shared future: the border villages along the river, the “Polish markets,” but also the intercultural circus, the international educational and exchange sites, and the bridge over the Oder that connect Słubice and Frankfurt, known as the Bridge of Friendship.

It no longer matters if we are on the left or the right side of the Oder: because in the places where there were once borders, or where there are borders, borders can also be overcome.

Anne Schönharting

The legacy, since 2017

What other families call the guest room was known as the “Africa Room” in Anne Schönharting’s family. Until just recently, it was located in one half of a semidetached house in Diera near Meissen, where it had been moved after German unification. The “Africa Room” was where the collection of her greatgrandfather Willy Klare was kept for four generations. From 1907 to 1914 Klare worked for a Liver poolbased trader as a cacao plantation manager in what is now Equatorial Guinea. There, he collected many objects, including weapons, everyday items, taxidermy animals, and jewelry. In addition, the collection contains hundreds of photographs as well as letters and postcards from the period.

For four generations the family kept this collection, continually rearranging it in their living space and adding their own travel souvenirs to it. During the GDR era, the room brought a sense of identity; it symbolized distance and broad expanses, the freedom to travel. Africa was considered a desirable destination; the colonial background and the provenance of the artifacts remained largely unconsidered.

After her parents’ deaths, the photographer was confronted with this legacy — and now, in her work, she places it in a different context. She exhibits the items in dream like scenes, surrounding them with light and warmth, allowing them to come to life, symbolically. With these photos, Schönharting undertakes an associative journey back into an unfamiliar past, deliberately starting a personal dialogue with her family’s past, with German and European history, and with the things colonialism is responsible for.

Linn Schröder

Not Again, Grandma, Mom, 2017–2020

Part of a long-term project “I Think Family Pictures, Too”.

The works of Linn Schröder tell of sorrow and pain, repression and memory. In January 1945 her mother-in-law, then a twelve-year-old girl, had to flee Upper Silesia with her mother and siblings. She did not deal with this escape until she became a grandmother and refugees once again arrived in Germany in 2015.

Just before her death in 2017 she began writing down her memories. They are exploratory, sparsely described, nearly emotionless journal entries: “Lice infested camp, outdoors, hunger, just miserable.”

A year after her death, Linn Schröder went to Poland, traveling along the escape route her mother-in-law had taken. She went with her children and her camera. And she made the trip during the winter, the same time of year that the 1945 escape began.

Stephanie Steinkopf

Virpi, 2014–2018

Virpi lives on a small island near Helsinki, in Finland. Earlier in life, Virpi was once a successful business woman who worked so much that she suffered from burnout and fell into a depression. She is — like many other members of the highachieving, neoliberal European society — among those who have suffered from the acceleration of work life. Where there are fewer opportunities to set up professional and personal boundaries, an overwhelming dynamic arises that is not often recognized before it is too late. Virpi’s story reveals the weak spots in a wellfunctioning welfare state such as Finland and the dark side of a socially and economically strong Europe.

Mila Teshaieva

Unfamiliar Memory, since 2016

Identity is always a confrontation between stories and history, between personal memories and official historiography.

Mila Teshaieva descended into the fogshrouded abyss of memory, where national mythology melds with individual experience to form an afterimage of a past. The Ukrainian born photographer asked people of different convictions, from different regions of her home country, to reconstruct scenes from their family history.

The family memories became performances; the performances became photographs that write an alternative history of the twentieth century. Above all, though, they ask: How are experiences recalled, dealt with, and finally handed down? How do individual memories transform into a supposed collective national memory, and, in turn, how does national heroism seep into family histories? And finally, how is the imagined reality we call the past created?

Heinrich Voelkel

No Easy Way Out, 2020

During the COVID-19 crisis in Germany Heinrich Voelkel has been driving along its closed borders. The state of emergency prevails in signal colors along 1,783 kilometers, with red-and-white tape, construction site barriers, and “no through traffic”-signs marking the end of freedom as we know it.

Voelkel’s pictures discover a country that has curled up into a ball in order to protect itself from a virus. They document how vital arteries have been cut off; how Europeans are no longer allowed to visit each other; how, from one minute to the next, nothing has been the same since. They show us landscapes painfully devoid of people, but whose marks of fear are tangible.

The nationalist state celebrates its return; it offers protection, sets up frameworks that had been forgotten. And yet it is obvious that these borders are temporary, provisory, symbolizing an attempt to main tain the concept of a united Europe: a discrepancy that Voelkel’s work carves out in strangely quiet, impressive tableaux.

Maurice Weiss

Si jamais ils reviennent, since 2015

“Si jamais ils reviennent” — in case they ever come back — is what a more than ninety-year-old lady in a small village in the south of France told us, when she explained why she still had an arsenal in her wine cellar. “They” are the German Nazis and collaborators against whom she fought as a young woman during the occupation in World War II. In those days she smuggled weapons for the Resistance, and today she still keeps rifles and pistols in her cellar.

The old lady lives in a village not far from the place where Maurice Weiss grew up. In his village — and in his childhood — the war was always present, even though nobody talked about the war: not his father, a soldier in the German army, nor his godfather, who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Still, it was easy to find the traces of the war there, and everywhere in Europe: traces in the landscape, family memories, the scars of loss. These are witnesses to the collective trauma that links all Europeans with each other.

Sebastian Wells

La Rada di Augusta, 2019–2020

One oil refinery after another is lined up on the Bay of Augusta, a thirty-kilometer-long coastal strip in southeastern Sicily. The petrochemical industry has put its mark on this landscape, its inhabitants, and their lives for a good seventy years.

Sebastian Wells accompanied the people who live here throughout their daily lives. The water, air, and soil are polluted. Rates of cancer and miscarriages are alarmingly high. Instead of twenty thousand jobs, as there were at the peak of the oil processing industry in the 1980s, there are now only seven thousand. Corruption is as omnipresent as the distrust of authority.

The differences between the wealthy north and the poor south of Italy are especially evident in this place. It is a place where the increasingly weathered artifacts of turbocapitalism blend with the ancient ruins of a more than two-thousand-year-old history.

Annette Hauschild

Paris after the terrorist attacks, 2015

Paris on the day after the terrorist attacks of November 13th, 2015.

Maurice Weiss

Paris after the terrorist attacks, 2015

Paris on the day after the terrorist attacks of November 13th, 2015.