HOME AGAIN – Migration | HOME | MEMORY

Curated by Andy Heller and Oliver Krebs

Willy-Brandt-Haus, Berlin

July 1 – September 25, 2022

Group exhibition with M L Casteel, Göran Gnaudschun, Andy Heller, Ulrike Kolb, Oliver Krebs, Eva Leitolf, Wiebke Loeper, Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Jana Sophia Nolle, Ingmar Björn Nolting, Peter Piller, Minna Rainio, Mark Roberts and Elena Subach

The 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.

Opening

June 30, 2022 at 7 pm

Introduction by

Mirja Linnekugel (artistic director, Freundeskreis Willy-Brandt-Haus)

Tamina Kutscher (chief editor, dekoder.org)

Ingo Taubhorn (chief curator, Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen Hamburg)