“It’s the fringes of the world that interest me, not its centre. The non-interchangeable is my concern when there is something in faces or landscapes that doesn’t quite fit.” SibylleBergemann

With this exhibition, the work of one of the leading contemporary German photographers will be presented to an international audiences. The photographs of Berlin-born SibylleBergemann are awe-inspiring for one because of the diversity of their subject matter and second for their astonishing insights and sensitivity. Bergemann commands subjects such as fashion, reportage, photographic essays, urban and rural landscapes as well as portraits in an equally self-assured manner. At first known as a fashion photographer, she fast became noted for her photographic essays and her precise observations of hidden contexts.

After two successful runs of the exhibition at the ‘Akademie der Künste’ in Berlin and the ‘Museum für Photographie’ in Braunschweig, the exhibition will now tour internationally on behalf of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa).

Bergemann’s photographs express a critical analysis of the reality during the times of the GDR as much as they are reflective of the conditions at the time. Having said that, the photographer always understood photography as a medium, which can transfer reality and context into a picture and not as mere depictions of such a reality. Bergemann understands photography rather as a medium through which she can shed light on the correlations of reality while constantly interpreting and commenting the circumstances. Thus, the peculiar details of her photographs become symbols that reflect subtle stories and nuances of their time.

‘It seems like the photographer wants to produce something that is presently absent: sparse notes from proximity, searching for roots, results of a voyage into dreams.’ Matthias Flügge, 2006

This aspect within Bergemann’s work becomes particularly apparent in the situational and scenic imageries of urban regions and in her work with the medium Polaroid. Bergemann began focusing on situational and scenic pictures in Berlin at the end of the 1960s and has been working on them ever since in cities such as New York, Paris, Tokyo, and São Paulo.

Speaker: Erik Prasetya, Dave Lumenta, Ipong Purnama Sidhi
Moderator: Henri Ismail