News

As already briefly mentioned in our last newsletter before the summer break, Tobias Kruse was awarded this year's Lotto Brandenburg Art Prize Photography. We are pleased to invite you to the award ceremony and exhibition opening in Potsdam! Both will take place simultaneously at Kunstraum Potsdam c/o Waschhaus in Schiffbauergasse.

Tobias Kruse's award-winning work "Deponie" (Landfill) will be on show there until the beginning of September. In addition, the series of the award winners Anne Heinlein and Beatrice Schuett Moumdjian will be shown.

Date of award ceremony and opening: 30.8.23, 7 p.m.

Duration: 31.8. until 8.9.23

Further information here.

We are very happy to be part of this year's program of the Photography Festival of the StädteRegion Aachen with our curated exhibition titled "Un visa pour Paris" (A visa for Paris). The exhibition is in line with the festival's theme of "Alliances" and will be showcased at Burg Frankenberg in Aachen. It features black and white photographs taken by our founder photographers, Sibylle Bergemann and Ute Mahler, during the 1970s to 1990s. Both artists had the opportunity to travel independently to Paris for the first time in the late 1970s, each capturing the life in this "city of longing" in their own unique way through their cameras. 

Duration: August 13th - September 10th, 2023 

More information here.

The Photography Festival of the StädteRegion Aachen is showing Jordis Antonia Schlösser's work „“Vor dem Verschwinden“ (Before Disappearance) in the group exhibition of the same title at the Eschweiler Kunstverein. Also represented in the exhibition with works that address the issue of brown coal mining are Magnum photographer Paulo Pellegrin, as well as Ernesto Wawra and Joachim Maurer. Jordis Antonia Schlösser returned to Garzweiler in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2019, where 17 years earlier she realized impressive black-and-white photographs of villages condemned to disappear for the Garzweiler II open pit mine, as part of a commission from the Swiss daily NZZ. These villages have since completely disappeared as a result of the mining of brown coal. When she returned four years ago, she documented everything that in turn will have disappeared this year - 2023 - or already has. 

Duration: August 13th - September 10th, 2023 

More information here.

Laufzeit: 13.8. bis 10.9.23 

Weitere Informationen hier.

With the new presentation of the collection in the west wing, Hamburger Bahnhof offers a polyphonic panorama of the Berlin art scene and the city itself, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present day. Through the special exhibition "Nationalgalerie. A Collection for the 21st Century," the public is invited to reflect together on the role of art and cultural institutions on inclusion, engagement, and change. Some 80 artworks, including paintings, works on paper, sculptures, photographs, videos, reflect the socio-political and economic factors that have shaped the city and the artistic practices that have emerged in it. Sibylle Bergemann is among the 60 artists on view; others include Rainer Fetting, Isa Genzken, Mona Hatoum, Emeka Ogboh, Anri Sala, Selma Selman, Isaac Chong Wai, and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. 

Duration: until further notice 

More information here.

 

 Sibylle Fendt is showing a selection of her artist portraits at Berlin-based project space LAGE EGAL [IN THE RACK ROOM] over the course of a month under the title "(Almost) Everyone Anyone." The solo exhibition takes an intercultural lens on gender equality, diversity, and portraiture. The photographer's focus is to showcase personalities rather than genders. Through her images, she offers unique perspectives on individuals with a strong stance, that inspires one to shape their own. 

Opening: July 27th, 2023, 7 p.m. 

More information here.

 As part of the theme year "Youth in the Oderbruch", the Oderbruch Museum Altranft is showing Stephanie Steinkopf's work „Manhattan – Straße der Jugend“ (Manhattan - Street of Youth). This work is now being shown for the first time in the region where it was created more than ten years ago. Right here, near the German-Polish border, in the midst of the green idyll of Brandenburg, lies "Manhattan" - as the residents of the village have called two high-rise buildings for years. Since the reunification, almost everything here has collapsed structurally. Today only 12 of the settlement's 40 apartments are still inhabited, and one block is completely empty. Stephanie Steinkopf's work has not lost any of its relevance and shows the constant development of social divisions, which is not an East German characteristic and is currently becoming increasingly apparent in many rural regions of East Germany. 

Duration: until September 2nd, 2023 

More information here. 

 

 As part of this year's festival theme, "Future Perfect," FOTODOKS presents the collaborative work of Sibylle Fendt and Paula Winkler titled "Tag X," which puts contemporary climate movements in the spotlight. Over the course of several months the photographers have accompanied actions and documented participants and tools of various climate movements. The works, which were created just before FOTODOKS, allow a differentiated view of the various groups, which are increasingly vilified and homogenized by the media and representatives of conservative parties. With a mixture of documentary photographs, staged portraits and still lifes, they depict a generation that feels compelled to act. 

Opening: July 12th, 2023, 6 p.m. in Munich

Running time: July 13th - August 20th, 2023 

Artist talk with the photographers: July 7th 2023, 2 p.m. 

More information here.

 

 FOTODOKS - The Festival for Contemporary Documentary Photography in Munich shows Tobias Kruse's work "Deponie", which recently was awarded the prestigious Lotto Brandenburg Art Prize for Photography.Congratulations from our side! The award ceremony will take place at Kunstraum Potsdam at the end of August, where the work "Deponie" will also be exhibited. The title „Deponie“ refers to the Ihlenberg landfill near Lübeck, where hazardous waste from West Germany was dumped for decades. It is still in operation and to this day it is unclear whether the hazardous materials have been secured or whether the regional groundwater could be contaminated. Symbolically, the dump in Tobias Kruse's series „Deponie“ stands for the physical but also social traces that the Third Reich, the GDR and reunification have left behind in his homeland and that are still visible today. 

Opening: July 12th, 2023, 6 p.m. 

Duration: July 13th - August 20th, 2023 

More information here.

 Anne Schönharting will give a guest lecture at Prager Fotoschule Austria about her artistic long-term projects and will provide insights into her working methods. She will also present her work "Das Erbe" (The Heritage), which explores her family's colonial legacy and its implications. The Tschick.Galerie of Prager Fotoschule, based in the tobacco factory Linz, will present this work at the same time in a solo exhibition. Anne Schönharting's other subjects include a long-term portrait series in Berlin-Charlottenburg, nomads in Kyrgyzstan, an urban utopia in India, a fashion campaign for Brioni, and life between the walls in Belfast. 

Lecture: July 1st, 2023, 2:30pm - 5pm 

Opening exhibition: July 1st 2023, 7:30pm with the photographer present 

More information here. 

 The OSTKREUZ photographers Jörg Brüggemann, Tamara Eckhardt, Annette Hauschild, Heinrich Holtgreve, Tobias Kruse, Ina Schoenenburg and Linn Schröder will be in Arles during the opening week of the Rencontres and are available for appointments. In addition, Kathrin Kohle and Mayela Illi from the agency's cultural department will be on site and will be happy to present the OSTKREUZ exhibitions . 

Festival week: July 3rd - July 9th, 2023 

For appointment requests, please contact k.kohle(at)ostkreuz.de 
 

 Tamara Eckhardt's work "Youth of the Island Field" is one of the winners of the gute aussichten Award, which is aimed specifically at photography graduates. This summer, her series, which focuses on the theme of childhood and coming of age, will be exhibited at the gute aussichten exhibition in the PHOXXI at the Deichtorhallen. Over a period of three years, she visited and accompanied young people in St. Mary's Park, a socially deprived neighborhood in Limerick, Ireland, and got to know their families. The portraits provide clues to their personalities, everyday activities, and offer intimate insights into the lives of the children growing up there. Tamara Eckhardt herself lived in Ireland as a child. 

Opening: June 30th 2023, 7pm 

Duration: July 1st - September 24th, 2023 

More information here. 

 Impressive works by our founders are part of the comprehensive exhibition "Der große Schwof - Feste feiern im Osten" (The Big Party - Celebrating Parties in the East), curated by Petra Göllnitz, which can be seen at the Kunstsammlung Jena until mid-October. In more than 300 photographs by 31 artists, the exhibition showcases a surprising glimpse into everyday culture in the German Democratic Republic (GDR): the act of celebrating, dancing, and drinking. People gathered spontaneously and more or less organized in private or unofficial social settings, often creating their own niches for the "Schwof." Beyond the constraints of daily life and imposed ideology, this "alternative" lifestyle largely escaped official control and provided refreshing spaces of freedom. 

Opening: June 30th 2023, 7 p.m. 

Duration: July 1st until October 15th, 2023 

More information here. 

In the Freelens workshop "Photography and AI - why actually?“ Heinrich Holtgreve takes the participants on a journey into the "brave new world" of artificial intelligence. The goal is to equip oneself for the existing and future debates about AI in photography - and to develop one's own attitude in order not to be harnessed by the agenda of big tech companies. The workshop takes place at the Ostkreuzschule in Berlin-Weißensee and has a fee. The deadline for registration is June 23rd. 

Date: June 29th 2023, 10am - 4 pm 

More information here. 

Last Wednesday evening, things got exciting for us: Johanna-Maria Fritz's series "An Afghan Carpet" was nominated for this year's Stern Prize in the category "Photo Story of the Year". In addition, our poster exhibition "Pictures from the Twin City" with photographs from Ukraine by Emile Ducke, Johanna-Maria Fritz, Mila Teshaieva and Sebastian Wells was also nominated - for the category "History of the Year".

Unfortunately, the prizes did not go to us in the end - but we are still happy to have been nominated twice!

We warmly congratulate MAGNUM photographer Nanna Heitmann ("War Is Peace" for DIE ZEIT) for the award in the category "Photo Story of the Year" and the team Katharina Kühn, Marc Rosenthal, Hajo Seppelt and Peter Wozny ("Wie Gott uns schuf - Coming Out in der Katholischen Kirche" for ARD) for the award in the category "Story of the Year"!

Further information here.

We are very pleased to announce that Mila Teshaieva has been awarded the prestigious Grimme Prize together with Marcus Lenz (Wildfilms)! Together they realised the documentary "Life after Butscha - Trauma and Hope" for WDR, which has now been awarded in the competition category "Information and Culture".

From the jury's statement:

"Mila Teshaieva and Marcus Lenz are on location in Borodyanka, Butscha and Irpin with their camera shortly after the end of the Russian occupation. Right at the beginning of the film, the filmmakers make it clear that they are showing "life afterwards". Within 44 minutes, they provide a highly topical, concentrated, sensitive and multi-layered insight into the region of Ukraine, which has become a worldwide headline due to atrocious violent crimes. They carefully capture what it means to have to administer alleged war crimes and to live everyday lives in the midst of destruction and suffering. (...) Teshaieva and Lenz deserve particular credit for the calm and clarity with which they capture moments and let them speak for themselves. All this happens in the midst of a situation in which it is absolutely unclear - even for the filmmakers - what will happen next. (...) Teshaieva and Lenz succeed in describing the situation, focusing on the people on the ground. They show mass graves, trauma and pain without becoming expository and the distress and excessive demands of the administration to provide clarification, documentation and structure without losing sight of committed local forces. Thus, they published an important contemporary document already in early July 2022, carried by the strength of the images and protagonists."

More information here.

As part of the workshop programme of the RAW Worpswede photo festival, Heinrich Holtgreve will give his workshop "Artificial Intelligence for Dummies" on the topic of AI in Bremen's Medienhaven.

Dall-E, Midjourney, DeepL and ChatGPT - behind these cryptic names are powerful AI tools that can theoretically be used by anyone. But what exactly is behind the individual software, what do they offer their users and how can photographers use them sensibly? The workshop provides insights into the various digital applications and also addresses very basic questions, such as how the algorithms are trained and who owns them. At the same time, it addresses aspects relevant to the image, such as the reproduction of stereotypes by AI tools and the copyright situation. The workshop offers space for questions and discussions around this topic. A maximum of 10 people can take part in the workshop, registration is requested.

On the subject of AI and photography, Heinrich Holtgreve has also recently conducted an interview with photo editor Frauke Schnoor, which can be viewed online at dots per inch.

Workshop: 10.6.23, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Further information and registration here.

As part of the F2 Fotofestival at Speicher100 // Atelier Amore in Dortmund, Sebastian Wells' work "Utopia" is part of the group exhibition "Dissecting Globality", which presents artistic positions from the fields of photography, moving image, sound art and other transmedial fields of work. For "Utopia", Sebastian Wells embarked on a visual journey through the provisional world of refugee camps in 2017 and 2018, visiting a total of twenty-four camps in seven countries in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In doing so, he focused on the everyday lives of refugees living in these supposedly temporary camps.

Signed copies of the self-published newspaper "Utopia" by Sebastian Wells can be ordered from the OSTKREUZ Shop.

Opening: 3.6.23, 8 pm. The exhibition will already be open from 11 am.

Duration: 4.6. until 2.7.23

Further information here.

From the end of May, the Flatz Museum in Dornbirn, Vorarlberg, will be showing the exhibition "Café Sibylle. Fashion and Everyday Life in the GDR" with photographs by Sibylle Bergemann and Ute Mahler.

On Karl-Marx-Allee, the socialist boulevard, there is still the famous "Café Sibylle", named after the magazine "Sibylle", which was popular in GDR times. The "Café Sibylle" regularly hosted meetings of editors and models as well as fashion shows. Sibylle" was first published in 1956 and was the leading magazine for fashion and culture in the GDR for over three decades. East Germany's best-known female photographers worked for it, and their pictures are now the focus of this exhibition. In addition to the OSTKREUZ founders Ute Mahler and Sybille Bergemann, Gundula Schulze Eldowy and Evelyn Richter are represented with photographs. All works are on loan from the F.C. Gundlach Foundation, Hamburg.

Opening: 25.5.23, 7 pm

Duration: 26.5. until 7.10.23

Further information here.

We are very pleased that the Goethe-Institut Jordan and the Image Festival Amman have invited us to the 11th edition of the photo festival at the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts with a group exhibition!

More than 30 years of political and social development in Germany have been continuously captured by the different generations of OSTKREUZ photographers since the agency was founded. OSTKREUZ thus has a comprehensive image archive of significant photographic contemporary documents from a third of a century, ranging from the 1980s to the present. The group exhibition shows twelve photographic positions from Germany on the festival theme "roots". The selected, emblematic series by the founding photographers Sibylle Bergemann, Harald Hauswald, Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler each enter into a dialogue with works by the subsequent OSTKREUZ generations, including Jörg Brüggemann, Sibylle Fendt, Annette Hauschild, Thomas Meyer, Frank Schinski, Jordis Antonia Schlösser, Linn Schröder and Heinrich Voelkel.

Jordis Antonia Schlösser and Heinrich Voelkel will be present at the opening at the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts.

Opening: 10.5.23, 6 pm

Duration: 11. to 31.5.23

More information here.

The Hamburg Offspace Gallery Hinterconti is showing Heinrich Holtgreve's photographic work "Wer hat, dem wird gegeben" (Whoever has will be given), created from 2016 to 2020, in a two-day solo exhibition. In this exhibition, the photographer examines the inequalities of European-style developed capitalism. For him, these - which otherwise only take shape in figures and statistics, books by sociologists and speeches by politicians - rarely come to light as strikingly as they do on the heel of Europe, where the British city of Gibraltar and the Spanish border town of La Línea de la Concepción share a border. While Gibraltar is booming as a tourist magnet and tax haven, a third of the people in La Línea are unemployed. While the turnover of the online casinos flows to Gibraltar, the ships of drug smugglers land in the hinterland of La Línea. Here Heinrich Holtgreve has found his way to sometimes romantic, sometimes sober, sometimes ironic and associative images.

Opening: 5.5.23, 8 pm

Running time: 6.5. and 7.5.23, both 4-7 p.m.

Further information here.