It was 50 years ago, on 13 August 1961, when the Berlin Wall was constructed by the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Today, 20 years after the fall of the Wall, Hong Kong public has a chance to witness this revolutionary political change during the autumn of 1989 and its subsequent developments through the exhibition ‘Scenes and Traces of a Fall – The Berlin Wall in the eyes of photographers’, an exhibition by the foundation Brandenburger Tor and curated by Matthias Harder.
Presented by Goethe-Institut Hongkong, the exhibition will be shown from 27 July to 17 September 2011 at the Goethe-Gallery of the Institut. Curator of the exhibition Matthias Harder will be present at the Finissage of the exhibition on 14 September 2011 (Wed) to meet the Hong Kong audience.
The exhibition ‘Scenes and Traces of a Fall’ puts together groups of works and individual photographs by renowned photographers including Thierry Buignet, Harald Hauswald, Kai-Olaf Hesse, Karl-Ludwig Lange, André Kirchner, Barbara Klemm, Nelly Rau-Häring and Maurice Weiss.
On 12 November 1989, three days after the fall of the Wall, CNN star reporter Peter Arnett was already reporting live from the Brandenburg Gate. The coverage of this topic by the international media, which is documented in some of the photos in the exhibition, testifies to the international significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the exhibition we witness signs of friendship against the backdrop of the provisionally opened Wall and we look into the faces of still grim looking and frustrated border guards and customs officers whose days were numbered. Time and again it is the Wall itself, covered with creative paintings in the West and in natural grey on the Eastern side, which forms the focus of the pictorial interest. The Wall in the hinterland is also depicted occasionally. The open Wall – from prominent places such as Potsdamer or Pariser Platz to remote bridges between Johannisthal and Rudow – remains the Leitmotif. The first moments of the connection between East and West, when a break was cut with heavy-duty gear, are referred to over and over again. The exhibition ‘Scenes and Traces of a Fall’ shows the various aspects of the fall of the Wall using individual styles and different approaches set between journalistic and classic architectural photography. Some describe the fall of the Wall spontaneously on location with all its inherent sense of drama, others photographed either systematically or with a certain reserve as if they did not trust neither the situation nor themselves.
A bilingual catalogue (German/ English) published by Nicolai-Verlag, Berlin, including texts by Monika Grütters, Norbert Lammert and Matthias Harder is available at the Goethe-Gallery, while visitors of the exhibition are welcome to watch DVDs on the topic at the Goethe-Institut’s Library which is located on the same floor as the Goethe-Gallery.
