Home Again

Freundeskreis Willy-Brandt-Haus, Stresemannstraße 28, 3OG, 10963 Berlin
Fr., 1. Juli 2022 12:00 Uhr bis So., 25. September 2022 18:00 Uhr

The group exhibition Home Again features contemporary photography and video works that explore the adaptability of a rapidly changing society. The artists set out in search of responses to the global transformation processes that are shaping our world today. How do people come together during and after crises? How do they centre themselves again?
And how do they regain their grounding in what may be a new home? Adaptation as a means of perpetuating our community.

The triad of Migration | Home | Memory forms the scaffolding for grouping the diverse artworks. The medium of photography proves to be a tool that enables the artists to look far beyond the merely documentary, catching a glimpse of the ideal. The works on view formulate and pursue strategies that would appear relevant against the backdrop of global transformation processes. They thus address elementary issues such as climate change and the associated deterioration of habitats, or mass migration and the increasing fragmentation of our society as a result.

The vanishing of familiar structures, something we experienced in a pronounced manner during social distancing, may be frightening, but it also gives us an incentive and the freedom to conceive new and more coherent ways of ordering our lives so we can make a new home for ourselves. Such processes of clarification and questioning are at the very heart of this exhibition.

Resisting the feeling of powerlessness, mustering the strength to abandon old familiar patterns and master new life realities – this is one way to respond to these crises. With our considerable resilience, we are able to live in symbiosis with these challenges. This is what makes us human and brings us together as a community, enabling us to deal with even the most existential threats. It always pays to look closely and find out which solutions are best for the community. Because these are the answers that reveal a great deal about our values and understanding, about our longings and our lives together.

“The world is outside but inside warm / Inside informal outside stormy inside normal.” This quote from a song by Mike Skinner of The Streets, which Oliver Krebs places alongside his images, describes how perception and interpretation struggle for supremacy. In his work Signal & Noise, Krebs explores this interplay. We constantly perceive signals of some sort – signs, particles of reality that we condense into an image. We then store these images in our memory and remember later. They give us orientation, help us to understand and to communicate – indeed, without such images we cannot survive.

In order to demonstrate how this works, Oliver Krebs has developed a visual language that deliberately moves between the classic photographic gaze and the metamorphic essence of painting, devising an idiom whose dense atmospheres and lighting are reminiscent of the chiaroscuro of the Renaissance.
Straddling the border between signal and noise, the often alien-looking images depicting our reality in an idiosyncratic way can be seen as a discourse on pictorial language that proposes a philosophy of perception. They are an attempt to illustrate with a photograph the subjectivity of all that we experience.
Translation by Jennifer Taylor‐Gaid

Curated by Andy Heller & Oliver Krebs