This year will mark the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall!
The Berlin gallery Kulturhaus Alte Feuerwache is exhibiting Birgit Kleber’s images of the Wall until November 17. The curator of the exhibition, Harald Martenstein, presents it this way.
It was always easy to recognize that Birgit Kleber was a special photographer, even back then, at the end of the 80s, in this strange biotope called “West Berlin”. Even back then, Birgit photographed her favorite people. The people in her photos seemed to reveal something that no other photographer seemed to have discovered in them. What was it? Even back then, this was her specialty: seeing the special, the essence, what matters. Something intimate, unprotected, that could not be summarized in two or three sentences, not even in ten, but in a single picture. Birgit Kleber often worked for a Berlin newspaper at the time, theTagesspiegel. But she wasn’t a press photographer or a reporter. She wanted something else. The editorial team was often at a loss, and everyone could easily recognize that these portraits were of outstanding quality. But – it was so different. When the Wall came down in Berlin in November 1989, Birgit Kleber did become a kind of reporter for a short time, but without an assignment, just for herself. She set out and tried out her gaze on something other than faces, on history, you could say, in these historic days. Her photos show upheavals, sometimes in detail, sometimes on a large scale. In this case, too, Birgit Kleber is not so interested in the superficial, in what newspapers put on page one. She is looking for the essence. The essence of these days is openness: something that seemed to be firmly established is suddenly gone. Everything is suddenly a construction site, life, the city, the future. People have all kinds of feelings – relief, euphoria, helplessness, curiosity, some even fear – everything is upside down. Can we still feel today what we felt back then? This is what this exhibition is about.
Harald Martenstein
Birgit Kleber : The Wall
Until November 17, 2024
Kulturhaus Alte Feuerwache
Marchlewskistr.6
10243 Berlin
http://www.alte-feuerwache-friedrichshain.de/
