From far away. Images of the GDR

Background information

"'This volume, 'From Far Away: Images of the GDR' by Michael Burhs and Sabine Schmid (eds.) features photographs from and about the GDR. It compares an exhibition at Museum Villa Stuck, Munich. The works on display are photographs by others and of their own (used again) that the artists have appropriated and rereleased for fresh viewing. Some of these works go beyond appropriation on the visual plane to interlock image and text in transmedial approaches, using one as the foil to the other and vice versa.

Content

All photographs in this compendium 'From far away. Images of the GDR' tell of places and situations as they once were. Nonetheless, the question arises of what reality a picture represents, especially when new, different relationships are created between images through artistic intervention. Dealing with the visual legacy of the GDR means not only revealing traces of reality going back to a time past: The exhibition is less concerned with the production of pictures and their potential for recording snippets from space and time than it is with the stores of knowledge they conceal and their multiple meanings. The specific contexts in which the photographs were taken and the times at which they were shot are visible, yet, most importantly, the question arises of how they are to be further dealt with and to which other semantic planes they have." (© Koenig, 2019)

About the participating photographers

• Olav AMENDE, Tina BARA, Michael BUHRS, Seiichi FURUYA, Annett GRÖSCHER, Tamami IINUMA, Sven JOHNE, Jens KLEIN, Christian LANGE, Emanuel MATHIAS, Katrin MAYER, Simon MENNER, Vanessa Joan MÜLLER, Einar SCHLEEF, Christine SCHLEGEL, Joachim SCHMID, Sabine SCHMID, Erasmus SCHRÖTER, Gabriele STÖTZER, Paul Alexander STOLLE, Christoph TANNERT, Elisabeth TONNARD, Andreas TROGISCH, Joerg WAEHNER and Ulrich WÜST.

Photo books by participating photographers

• BARA, Tina
  FURUYA, Seiichi
  IINUMA, Tamami
  JOHNE, Sven
  KLEIN, Jens
  KUTTNER, Jürgen
  LANGE, Christian
  MATHIAS, Emanuel
  MAYER, Katrin
  MENNER, Simon
  SCHLEEF, Einar
  SCHLEGEL, Christine
  SCHMID, Joachim
  SCHRÖTER, Erasmus
  SCHWEIZER, Maya
  STÖTZER, Gabriele
  STOLLE, Paul Alexander
  TONNARD, Elisabeth
  TROGISCH, Andreas
  WAEHNER, Joerg
  WÜST, Ulrich