BERLIN.- Blain|Southern Berlin presents new and recent photographs by Wim Wenders, the artist’s first exhibition in his hometown in over half a decade. The exhibition brings together images of Germany and America – the two countries that have most influenced the artist throughout his career.
The exhibition’s title Time Capsules. By the side of the road alludes to the relationship between memory and photography, highlighting the ability of photographs to act as a medium that captures an essence of the past and preserves it for the future.
In the gallery’s main space, urban and natural landscapes exist in dialogue, as panoramic photographs of the countryside surrounding Berlin stand in relation to images of the city in flux during the early 1990s. The jungle of cranes, metal and concrete in Potsdamer Platz (1995) is starkly mirrored by the dense foliage depicted in Forest in Brandenburg (2014).
Landscape near Wittenberge, Germany (2014) recalls the mood of Romantic paintings from the 18th and 19th Century, with trees akin to those of Camille Corot or Caspar David Friedrich. Growing up in Dusseldorf in the post-war period, Wenders was surrounded by rubble and the traces of destruction, and remembers the prints of French and Dutch landscape paintings that lined his parents’ walls, “which showed a whole unknown aspect of the world” to him. Another photograph, The Elbe River near Dömitz (2014), depicts the reverse angle of a river as captured by Wenders forty years ago in his film ‘In the Course of Time’ ( Im Lauf der Zeit ).
The artist describes how the scale of these works aims to “transport people to those places in the world that I found and liked; photographs give me a chance to take the places to them ”. As such his newest panorama, at four and a half metres in width, depicts the epic landscape of the American West – an area that Wenders has extensively and famously examined through both film and photography.
Several of the works in the exhibition feature places that have long-since changed, the images themselves therefore becoming portals into lost moments or spaces. Wenders speaks of how: “I see myself as an interpreter, as a translator, a guardian […] of stories that places tell me.”
In the upstairs gallery, smaller-scale prints depict multifarious stories from Germany and America; a giant mountain of salt overlooks an eerily-quiet town; a perforated cinema screen stands disused and abandoned; a woman rests alone at the end of an American saloon bar.
The exhibition fosters a dialogue between the two countries in which Wenders has spent extensive periods of time living and working: “I think I had wide-open eyes for America, and ‘the American landscape’ in a general sense seemed extremely attractive to me, both as a photographer and filmmaker. Maybe the long absence from Germany of 15 years has enabled me to see places here with the same wide-open eyes. What has remained the same: in those landscapes, German or American, I’m still looking for the traces of civilization, of history, or people.”
Wim Wenders (b.1945) is one of the most important figures to emerge from the New German Cinema period of the 1970s. Alongside directing atmospheric auteur films, the artist works with the medium of photography, and his poignant images of desolate landscapes engage themes including memory, time, loss, nostalgia and movement.
Wenders studied medicine and philosophy before settling in Paris to become a painter and engraver. His career as a filmmaker began in 1967, when he enrolled at the newly-founded Academy of Film and Television, Munich. Along with fifteen other directors and writers, he founded the company Film Verlag der Autoren in 1971, then directing his Road Movie Trilogy Alice in the Cities (1973), The Wrong Move (1974) and Kings of the Road (1975), in which his characters confront their lack of roots in post-war Germany.
He won the Golden Palm at Cannes Film Festival in 1984, along with the Best Director award at the BAFTAs for his film Paris, Texas . The artist’s critically acclaimed film Wings of Desire was made in 1987, winning him the Best Director award at Cannes. Most recently, he was awarded the Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at the Berlin Film Festival (2015), as well as receiving Oscar nominations for his documentary films Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Pina (2011) and Salt of the Earth (2014).
Wenders became a member of the Academy of Arts Berlin in 1984. He was awarded honorary doctorates at the Sorbonne University in Paris (1989), the Theological Faculty of University of Fribourg (1995), the University of Louvain (2005) and the Architectural Faculty of the University of Catania (2010). He is presently the European Film Academy president and is a member of the order Pour le Mérite. He has been teaching film as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg.
Since 1986, Wenders' photographs have been exhibited internationally at museums and galleries including the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1986); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2001); Guggenheim Bilbao (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2003); Shanghai Museum of Art (2004); Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome (2006); Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2010); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, and Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (2012); Fundació Sorigué, Lleida (2013); Villa Pignatelli, Naples, and GL Strand, Copenhagen (2014). A major retrospective of his photographs was presented at Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf in 2015.
