BERLIN.- At Haus am Kleistpark, photographer Hannes Jung is confronting one of the most difficult and least publicly discussed legacies of the Bosnian War: the sexualized violence committed against men.
On view through June 28, 2026, Men don’t cry brings together photographs made in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 2017 and 2024. The exhibition does not seek to shock through explicit images. Instead, Jung approaches trauma quietly, through portraits, landscapes, domestic interiors and fragments of daily life that suggest how violence can remain present long after the event itself has passed.
For years, Jung has used photography to ask what war leaves behind in people and in society. His work often moves between documentary research and a more poetic, symbolic visual language. In Men don’t cry, that approach becomes especially important, because the subject at the center of the exhibition is one that resists direct representation.
During the Bosnian War, from 1992 to 1995, women and men of different nationalities were subjected to sexualized violence in camps and prisons. Men were tortured, abused and, in some cases, forced to commit violence against one another. Estimates suggest that between 20,000 and 50,000 women and men experienced sexualized violence during the conflict.
While crimes against women have received growing documentation and recognition, male victims have often remained invisible. Shame, silence, social expectations and rigid ideas of masculinity have made it difficult for many survivors to speak openly. The title of the exhibition, Men don’t cry, points directly to that pressure: the demand that men endure pain without showing it, even when the trauma is profound.
Jung does not try to photograph trauma as spectacle. He understands that, decades later, neither bodies nor places necessarily reveal what happened. A field, a room, a river or a face may appear calm, while carrying histories that cannot be immediately seen.
His black-and-white images are deliberately restrained. A farmer stands with his cows. A white shirt hangs quietly. Curtains cover a window. Trees disappear into fog. Water ripples across a disturbed surface. At first, many of the photographs seem almost ordinary. But slowly, a sense of unease emerges. The images feel suspended between normal life and something unresolved.
The portraits are especially careful. Jung photographs men who chose to share their stories, but he does not reduce them to their suffering. They appear in their own environments, sometimes tense, sometimes calm, sometimes almost at ease. They are present before the camera, but the past is never far away.
Throughout the exhibition, selected quotations from the men’s testimonies are placed in dialogue with the photographs. Together, words and images create a layered account of memory, repression, loss and survival. Rather than illustrating the testimonies directly, the photographs open a space around them — a space for silence, hesitation and reflection.
The result is not an exhibition about victimhood alone. It is also about endurance. Jung’s photographs acknowledge shame, powerlessness and pain, but they also point to the persistence of those who continue to live with what happened.
By focusing on sexualized violence against men, Men don’t cry challenges inherited ideas about masculinity. It asks what happens when social expectations prevent men from naming their vulnerability, and how silence can become part of trauma itself.
Hannes Jung, born in 1986, studied photography in Munich, Valencia and Hanover. Since 2009, he has worked as a freelance photographer on social and political subjects. His practice moves between documentation and subjective interpretation, often exploring the relationship between memory, identity, violence and collective history. His work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and publications, and he received the Lotto Brandenburg Art Prize for Photography in 2025.
An artist talk with Jung and journalist and author Dirk Auer will take place on June 11 at 7 p.m. The exhibition closes on June 28 with a finissage and podcast event featuring Krsto Lazarević and Danijel Majić of the Neues vom Ballaballa-Balkan podcast.
Men don’t cry is on view at Haus am Kleistpark | Projektraum, Grunewaldstr. 6–7, Berlin, through June 28, 2026.
