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Kurt Rohde (1920-1996)
untitled
Silver gelatin paper |
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The Photographer. A Change of Perspective |
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| 30 June – 17 August 2023 |
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Curated by Sara-Lena Maierhofer, Katja Böhlau, Patrick Knuchel and Benjamin Kummer.
A special exhibition of the Kunstbibliothek – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in cooperation with the Lette Verein Berlin. |
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Felicia Feith
Maidie, 2023
Fine Art Print |
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In this exhibition, current artistic approaches enter into an open dialogue with a set of works that has long lain quietly in the storage depots of the Photography Collection at the Kunstbibliothek (Art Library).
The estate of amateur photographer Kurt Rohde (1920–1996) opens up a multilayered frame of reference for the aesthetic and critical examination of this photographer’s work, the medium of photography, and the handling of archives. |
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Veronika Rehm
postcards, 2023
interactive wall installation |
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"Even today, I stand in my darkroom almost every day – – – and yet I never finish", Kurt Rohde wrote to an acquaintance in 1996.
To finish, what does that mean? To come to a conclusion? Has Kurt Rohde’s estate been finalized and is telling us his story? Or should the archival material be seen as part of an unfinishable process? Rohde’s countless slides, prints, and experiments in the darkroom became the starting point for an artistic intervention by photography students from the Berlin Lette Verein. In their works, they revived the images and their ordering principles. A trained chemist, Kurt Rohde was first a production engineer at Osram and later a professor at the Institut für Technologie und Planung Druck at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin (now the Berlin University of the Arts). From the 1950s to mid-1990s, he photographed intensively: primarily portraits, landscapes, and events, but also city views and nudes, with his photographs hovering on the threshold between public and private photography. Rohde’s archive now forms a resonance space for artistic exploration. |
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Lula Bornhack
fluid, 2023
Print on fabric |
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With their interventions and reworkings, the artistic approaches take the images’ narratives to their limits and reveal their fragility. What do we see in these photographs with no knowledge of certain contexts and backgrounds? Do we look at the subjects differently today? Which themes and viewing regimens become apparent? How does the historical present become visible in Rohde’s images? And how does a machine read the photographs? What pictorial information is considered important? Very different methods were chosen for the artistic examination of these and other questions. Collage and montage encounter animation and machine learning in the works. Analog meets digital, and space meets surface.
In addition to the new works created, the exhibition provides insights into the source material, inviting visitors to discover photography’s current and past ways of seeing the world and being used. In the process, it becomes possible to grasp the extent to which the artistic approaches are not to be understood as the end but as part of a process in dealing with archives. |
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Robin C Wolf
the world in a box, 2023
Mixed Media Installation |
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© 18 Jun 2023 photography now UG (haftungsbeschränkt) i.G.
Ziegelstr. 29 . D–10117 Berlin
Editor: Claudia Stein & Michael Steinke
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