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Johanna-Maria Fritz: Cassandra is holding an ox heart
Photo:
Johanna Maria Fritz / OSTKREUZ
In the year of reunification, the Ostkreuz photographer agency was founded.
It was named after a traffic junction in Berlin: At Ostkreuz station, rails from all directions converge.
In terms of content, the photography agency tried to provide orientation in a time of upheaval.
With the new Ostkreuz exhibition "Continents - In Search of Europe" at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, the Berlin artist collective is documenting that the European reorganization has not yet been completed.
In 22 photo essays, the photographers present a search for clues, they explore landscapes, family stories and individual fates with an often intimate look.
The approaches are very different: Johanna-Maria Fritz, for example, visited a self-confident witch in Romania, Jordis Antonia Schlösser dealt with Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
Europe is a lot, it's just not easy.
Sometimes it's ugly, sometimes it's beautiful, sometimes it's pretty strange.
The agency regularly plans to look together - that the creative minds wanted to deal with Europe this time, it was already clear to the group at the beginning of 2015, in the same year the feeling of community on the continent was exerted by the mass flight to Europe and Merkel's "We can do it" Test bench put.
By November 13th at the latest it was clear that the photographers couldn't help but put Europe at the center of their work for the joint show.
It was the day of the attack in the Bataclan, and all Ostkreuz people were in Paris, because it was the week of the big, international photo fair "Paris Photo".
Some of the pictures that Ostkreuz photographer Maurice Weiss took shortly after the attack in a wounded city appeared in SPIEGEL at the time, and some can now be seen in Berlin.
They hang in a space clearly separated from the rest of the exhibition by two U-shaped partitions together with those of his colleague Annette Hauschild, also from this event - and with black and white photographs by Sibylle Bergemann, which were first taken from the GDR in 1979 Paris was allowed to travel.
Curator Ingo Taubhorn explains that this form of presentation is the result of a long process.
Bergemann died in 2010, her Ostkreuz membership was posthumously preserved, and there was a wish to honor the memory of the co-founder again.
Her atmospheric black-and-white photos show the city in the heart of Europe in a very peaceful way.
The new images of death and destruction after the terrorist attacks are all the more blatant and tragic.
The Ostkreuz people call this room "The Broken Heart".
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Curator Ingo Taubhorn two weeks before the exhibition opens: "A long process"
Photo: Katharina Stegelmann / DER SPIEGEL
The other works could hardly be more different; they are primarily to be understood as an attempt to find answers to open questions: What is Europe actually?
Can it be captured geographically or politically?
How do we live here?
The photo series are assigned podcasts that are published on the
Website for the exhibition can be called up, and can also be heard in the Akademie der Künste via sound showers.
The artists talk about their motivation, their experiences, their ideas.
All the pictures speak for themselves
We see: dignified, deeply sad portraits of young men, the photographer Sibylle Fendt reports in the podcast about her long-term project with refugees who were stranded in a remote accommodation in the Black Forest.
We see: a white horse in a stable that is far too narrow.
And hear in the podcast that Espen Eichhöfer, who was born in Norway, originally wanted to take photographs of the rise of nationalistic tendencies in Europe.
In the process, he brooded over his personal relationship with his origins and homeland - and took photos at his great-uncle's Norwegian farm.
Some motifs seem very elegiac: closed border trees during the corona lockdown or landscapes on the Elbe, Danube, Rhine, Volga and Po.
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In the series "Papa, Gerd and the North Man", Norway-born Espen Eichhöfer deals with his relationship to home and origin
Photo: Katharina Stegelmann / DER SPIEGEL
All the pictures speak for themselves.
Via the podcasts, in which the personal connection between the artists and their work becomes clear, they develop a special intensity for the visitor.
The series do not provide a clear answer to the question of what Europe is now - of course not, who could give it.
Nevertheless, it is wiser to get out of the show.
The exhibition "Continents - In Search of Europe" can be seen until January 10th in the rooms of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.
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