“[It] felt like stumbling into a piece of street theater, a drama of redemption fit for one of the city’s famous opera houses, part morality play, part masquerade, part theater of memory—all performed above an abyss. […] Jewishness is being staged and celebrated everywhere, from theater to klezmer to Jewish cooking, but this “Jewish revival” often feels less like an act of healing than some novel form of disfigurement.”
– Frédéric Brenner in his essay on the exhibition ZERHEILT: HEALED TO PIECES
recording available

Where
W. M. Blumenthal Academy,
Klaus Mangold Auditorium
Fromet-und-Moses-Mendelssohn-Platz 1, 10969 Berlin
(Opposite the Museum)
video recording from 2 March 2022; Jewish Museum Berlin 2022
In this artist talk, the photographer Frédéric Brenner will speak with the historian Daniel Schönpflug about how to contextualize his work ZERHEILT: HEALED TO PIECES, which is currently on display at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Does the photographic essay fit within a practice of staging Jewishness? Or are the photographs an echo of a farewell, perhaps an expression of a new beginning? Are Jews already losing their symbolic function for Germans?
In his photographic essay ZERHEILT, the internationally renowned photographer Frédéric Brenner explores Berlin as a site of various stagings of Jewishness. The exhibition offers fragmentary glimpses of life in this city that are replete with paradoxes, dissonances, gaps, and opposing narratives between grappling with the past and the desire for redemption.
Frédéric Brenner
Frédéric Brenner is known for his photographic investigations of longing, belonging, and exclusion. In his works, he creates a visual memory of contemporary Jewish people.
Daniel Schönpflug
Daniel Schönpflug is a professor of contemporary history at the Freie Universität Berlin and the academic coordinator at the Wissenschaftskollegs zu Berlin (Berlin Institute for Advanced Study).
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Program Accompanying ZERHEILT: Hevrutah: Zerheilen – Healing to Pieces (4)
Video Recordings: Watch Past Museum Events (71)
Frédéric Brenner (Photographer)

Frédéric Brenner – ZERHEILT: HEALED TO PIECES
Photo exhibition
Exhibition
3 Sep 2021 to 24 Apr 2022

Without the leaves, I would not have started
Frédéric Brenner about his new photographic essay, ZERHEILT: HEALED TO PIECES, and Jewish life in Berlin
Essay
2021

Hevrutah: Zerheilen – Healing to Pieces. An Invitation to Learn Together
Program Accompanying the Exhibition ZERHEILT
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Oct 2021 to Mar 2022
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