This exhibition explores the complexity of Israel and the West Bank—their topography, inhabitants, and everyday life—from the perspective of twelve internationally acclaimed photographers.
Photographer and project initiator Frédéric Brenner says that his point of departure for the project was the desire to add new artistic visions to the images familiar from reporting on the region. He convinced renowned photographers to join him: Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington.
All the photographers are from outside Israel or the West Bank. Between 2009 and 2012, the twelve artists spent extended periods of time in residence in Israel and the West Bank. They were free to approach their research and the pinpointing of their subjects as they chose.
Together, the more than 200 photographs create a complex visual portrait. Themes such as identity, family, the homeland, and landscape come into focus, while emphasis on the Middle East conflict varies. The result is a deeply humanistic and nuanced examination in which art reaches beyond the illustration of conflict and becomes a platform for raising questions and engaging viewers in a conversation. The widely differing works invite viewers to discuss the heterogeneousness of the region.
A Small Glimpse into the Variety of the Photographs in the Exhibition
Frédéric Brenner, The Aslan Levi Family, 2010; copyright: Frédéric Brenner, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery
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Fazal Sheikh, From the Desert Bloom series, 11/13/2011, Latitude: 31°7'40"N / Longitude: 34°18'49"E, underground communications and power lines to the border fence and intersecting seismic test line, border zone between the Negev and Egyptian Sinai; copyright: Fazal Sheikh
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Wendy Ewald, At Home (photograph by Amal), 2013; copyright Wendy Ewald
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Stephen Shore, Large Crater, Negev Desert, 2009; copyright: Stephen Shore
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Thomas Struth, Z-Pinch Plasma Lab, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, 2011; copyright: Thomas Struth
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Josef Koudelka, Route 60, Beit Jala, Bethlehem area, specially designed concrete slabs were incorporated into the Wall along major transport routes such as Road 60 to prevent potential attacks; copyright: Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos
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Martin Kollar, no title; copyright: Martin Kollar
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Jungjin Lee, Unnamed Road 045, 2011; copyright: Jungjin Lee
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Gilles Peress, Contact Sheet, Palestinian Jerusalem, 2013, Installation view detail; copyright: Gilles Peress
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Rosalind Fox Solomon, Jerusalem, 2011; copyright: Rosalind Fox Solomon
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Jeff Wall, Daybreak, 2011; copyright: Jeff Wall
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Nick Waplington, no title; copyright: Nick Waplington
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Frédéric Brenner, The Aslan Levi Family, 2010; copyright: Frédéric Brenner, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery
Frédéric Brenner explores Israel as a place of radical heterogeneity, where longing, belonging and exclusion constantly permeate through lived experience. Brenner’s meticulous research is visualised as individual and societal moments that pinpoint the condition of contemporary Israel. The installation of his photographs, with a constellation of prints in various sizes, reflects the diversity of his subjects and the multiplicity of his photographic narration.
Fazal Sheikh, From the Desert Bloom series, 11/13/2011, Latitude: 31°7'40"N / Longitude: 34°18'49"E, underground communications and power lines to the border fence and intersecting seismic test line, border zone between the Negev and Egyptian Sinai; copyright: Fazal Sheikh
Fazal Sheikh’s Desert Bloom continues his ongoing exploration of memory and loss, and refuge in our contemporary world. Sheikh will be showing a grid of forty eight aerial photographs, each taken from above the traces of disappeared Bedouin villages, their size and location practically invisible from ground level. In this body of work, Sheikh narrates a powerful story about a community, their land and their exclusion.
Wendy Ewald, At Home (photograph by Amal), 2013; copyright Wendy Ewald
Wendy Ewald initiated fourteen participatory photography projects in Israel and the West Bank with community groups including schools, a women’s group, market stall owners and high-tech workers. Ewald has selected approximately five hundred photographs from an archive of thousands of photographs created by members of the fourteen groups. The small prints will be backed with aluminium and installed on parallel ledges, conveying the range of voices of the participants and the distinct preoccupations and character of each of these communities.
Stephen Shore, Large Crater, Negev Desert, 2009; copyright: Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore’s exploration of Israel takes a range of forms including digital photographs and resulting ebooks, and colour and black-and-white photographs. Shore will be presenting a selection of color works (captured with his signature 8”x10” negative camera) that offer clear and astutely observed facets of contemporary Israel and visual manifestations of its divisions and histories.
Thomas Struth, Z-Pinch Plasma Lab, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, 2011; copyright: Thomas Struth
Thomas Struth’s large scale color photographs create substantial, individuated experiences of Israel. The selection of works for this exhibition includes landscapes, cityscapes, industrial and religious architectural interiors and a family portrait. Struth’s photographic hallmark is his attention to the delineation of culture and society in the visual world and this body of work provides a profound perspective onto Israel.
Josef Koudelka, Route 60, Beit Jala, Bethlehem area, specially designed concrete slabs were incorporated into the Wall along major transport routes such as Road 60 to prevent potential attacks; copyright: Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos
Josef Koudelka makes the wall of separation the central character of his epic body of photographic work. His graphic, panoramic photographs convey the sense of this archaic landscape, the impact of the wall upon it and the painful reality of the wall’s dividing route. Koudelka will print an accordion layout of all of the images he has created for this project, a literal and metaphorical representation of this monumentally linear structure. Each venue will design the structure with which Koudelka’s wall can run through an exhibition space.
Martin Kollar, no title; copyright: Martin Kollar
Martin Kollar’s project, entitled Field Trip, features a series of photographs rich with subtle drama and visual strangeness. Kollar captures contradictions and incongruities that visualise the threat of impending violence embedded in the routine normalcy of everyday life in Israel. The photographs, of various sizes, will be shown in a mosaic installation, animating the wall space with Kollar’s intuitive and observant understanding of Israel.
Jungjin Lee, Unnamed Road 045, 2011; copyright: Jungjin Lee
Jungjin Lee presents a selection of large-scale panoramic prints that immerse the viewer in the weighty layers of history that Lee experienced in the landscapes of Israel. Lee’s hand-made prints trace the embedded sadness and poignancy of the many abandoned and de-humanised places that she encountered. Lee will show a small selection of her large-scale prints that literally envelop the viewer in the sense of a broken land.
Gilles Peress, Contact Sheet, Palestinian Jerusalem, 2013, Installation view detail; copyright: Gilles Peress
Gilles Peress makes an astute observation of the psychological ‘temperature’ of Israel and the West Bank. His photographs, taken on the streets, represent their inhabitants as embodiments of the extremities of perspectives that shape Israel. In his large-scale grid of photographs, Peress choreographs a sense of the ‘all or nothing’ attitude that he perceives as central to an understanding of this place.
Rosalind Fox Solomon, Jerusalem, 2011; copyright: Rosalind Fox Solomon
Rosalind Fox Solomon’s portraits collectively create a compassionate and personal evocation of Israel’s ethnic diversity. Approximately thirty of her black-and-white portraits of individuals and intimate family groups will be installed to create a powerful evocation of the relationships and lives that Solomon encountered on her journeys through Israel.
Jeff Wall, Daybreak, 2011; copyright: Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall’s large-scale photograph depicts Bedouin olive pickers sleeping outdoors on a farm in the Negev Desert in the south of Israel. As the sun rises over the farm and flushes the sky, the prison that sits on the hill behind the farm emanates its cold presence.
Nick Waplington, no title; copyright: Nick Waplington
Nick Waplington has created an archive of over 1,300 photographs that represent the people and sites of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. These well-researched and faithful depictions are realized as 8”x10” contact prints, combining landscapes and portrait imagery to create a detailed insight into this practice. For this exhibition, Waplington will be installing a grid of approximately fifty landscapes and family portraits.
Frédéric Brenner, who spearheaded the project, believed that no single vantage point could fully express the complexity of this historic and contested place. Moreover, when he speaks of Israel, perhaps most importantly he has in mind the metaphorical Israel, the place that gave birth to the notion that a particular territory can hold out a promise to humanity.
The scope and ambition of This Place rivals such past endeavors as the Farm Security Administration’s commission to photograph Depression-era America in the 1930s or France’s Mission Photographique de la DATAR, which documented the French countryside of the 1980s. Unlike those precedents, however, This Place received no government funding.
The Artists about their Experiences with the Project This Place
Frédéric Brenner is best known for his opus Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, the result of a 25-year search in 40 countries to create a visual record of the Jewish people at the end of the twentieth century. He has had solo exhibits at venues such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography in New York, Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie Arles, the Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne, as well as in Mexico City, Tel Aviv, Paris, Amsterdam, and Buenos Aires.
Wendy Ewald has spent 50 years collaborating with children, families, and teachers all over the world. In her work, she encourages her collaborators to use cameras to record themselves, their families and their communities, and to articulate their fantasies and dreams. She has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of American Art, the Fotomuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland, among others, and participated in the 1997 Whitney Biennial.
Martin Kollar has received the Prix Elysee and the Oscar Barnack Award, among other awards. His photographs have been featured in numerous exhibitions worldwide at venues including the Slovak National Gallery (Bratislava), Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Maison Européene de la Photographie (Paris) and Musee de l’Elysee in Lausanne.
Josef Koudelka left Czechoslovakia for political asylum in 1970 and shortly thereafter joined Magnum Photos. Since 1986, he has worked with a panoramic camera. Exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; the Hayward Gallery, London; the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam; the Art Institute of Chicago; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Palais de Tokyo and the Pompidou Centre, Paris.
Jungjin Lee creates cross-cultural photographic landscapes which intermix techniques and materials of Eastern and Western traditions of both painting and photography. Lee’s work has been exhibited widely in the world including a retrospective at the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland (2016) and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea (2018).
Gilles Peress has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Erich Solomon Prize, and grants from National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty Museum, the Walker Art Center, and Centre Georges Pompidou, among others.
Fazal Sheikh documents people living in displaced and marginalized communities around the world. His principle medium is the portrait, although his work also encompasses personal narratives, found photographs, sound, and his own written texts. The recipient of many international prizes, Sheikh’s work has been exhibited in museums around the world, including the Tate Modern, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Paris.
Stephen Shore became the first living photographer (at age 24) to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, forty years earlier. He has had one-man shows at Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major retrospective spanning Shore's entire career.
Rosalind Fox Solomon examines relationships and survival and the deep connections between power, rejection, struggle, sorrow, ritual and faith. Solomon’s photographs are in the collections of over 50 museums, and her work has been shown in nearly 30 solo exhibitions and 100 group exhibitions. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the International Center of Photography’s 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award.
Thomas Struth was part of the first generation of artists to study photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher, and is one of Germany’s leading artists. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museo del Prado, Madrid, the Museum Folkwang, Essen and Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Jeff Wall has exhibited his work at museums around the world including the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. He had a touring solo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Art, in 2007.
Nick Waplington received an International Center of Photography Infinity Award in 1993, and represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale in 2001. He has exhibited widely including the Whitechapel Gallery, London and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work is held in a number of prominent museum collections including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
After appearing at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the exhibition can now be seen in Germany for the first time.
The exhibition was organized by the Chronicle of a People Foundation, Inc., New York.
Accompanying publication This Place, ed. Matt Brogan, texts by Matt Brogan, Charlotte Cotton, Miki Kratsman, Jeff Rosenheim, Rachel Seligman, graphic design by Julia Wagner, grafikanstalt (2019, English, 280 pp., 279 ills., hardcover; size: 32x30 cm; price: 48 €, in our museum shop: 44 € ) will be published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
Exhibition Information at a Glance
- When
7 Jun 2019 to 19 Apr 2020
- Where
Old Building, level 1
Lindenstraße 9–14, 10969 Berlin
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