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WHAT STANDS BETWEEN US

HGB artists Susanne Keichel, Raisan Hameed and Tobias Zielony, together with 20 contemporary artists, are part of the central festival exhibition was zwischen uns steht. Photography as a medium of the EMOP Berlin chronicle. EMOP Berlin - European Month of Photography is the largest biennial festival of photographic images in Germany. Museums, exhibition venues, memorials, archives, collections, libraries, cultural institutes, universities, art academies and other educational institutions in the field of photography, municipal and private galleries and project spaces from Berlin are - together with the exhibiting artists - the key players in this open festival format.
In times of crisis, we give in to emotions and allow ourselves to be polarized by photographs and texts. At the same time, we want to raise our own voice – and images – against the increasing division. But what can we actually know, prove, or say with images, especially photographic ones? Isn’t it precisely the camera that stands between us? It records without respite and reinforces the respective certainties on countless platforms with their ‘bubbles’. Images deepen rifts, embody dissent, act as a medium of polarization, and promote the ‘fake’.

The festival exhibition what stands between us. Photography as a Medium for Chronicling attempts to break this cycle of permanent self-reassurance. Projects by around 20 artists stand for ‘understanding from the other’s perspective’ (Emmanuel Levinas) and for lending resonance to the other person through one’s own voice – not as a loudspeaker that drowns out everything, but in a critical reflection on how to describe and narrate reality beyond the familiar simplified frameworks. In micro-stories, the works address, among other things, the connection between social background and educational opportunity, the ongoing exclusion of people with a history of migration, experiences of the period immediately following post-reunification, and the radicalization of certain social sectors. The works also questioningly approach Russia’s war against Ukraine and the war in the Middle East – not as assertions, but with a critical distance.

The works of contemporary artists are supplemented by materials from the archives of the Akademie der Künste, such as the estates of John Heartfield and Walter Benjamin, who render palpable the layer of memory politics underlying the exhibition project as a basic sound. Because it’s not always about the ‘big story’ – on the contrary. ‘A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.’ (Walter Benjamin)