Galerie Peter Herrmann |
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| Berry Bickle | Suite Europa |  |
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Exhibition Opening: Sunday October 9th, 2011 from 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM The opening will be attended by Berry Bickle and Raphael Chikukwa, curator of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe and of the Zimbabwe Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition will run until November 13th, 2011. |
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We will show two photographic series, Suite Europa and Dual Narratives, along with two films, Ze… and On the Wire. In honor of Berry Bickle’s inclusion in the Zimbabwe Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, we will offer a more pointed presentation of her work. |
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| Suite Europa - Zoo, Leipzig 140 x 92,98 cm, C-Print on Alu-Dibond |
The artist first gained recognition in Germany when she participated in the international travelling exhibition Africa Remix, which began in Düsseldorf. She went on to make guest appearances at the ifa-Galerie in Berlin and Stuttgart with Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie. Bickle has exhibited in numerous group and solo shows around the world. The video On the Wire, which features Maputo as its backdrop, won the Jury Prize at the Bamako Biennale in 2009. Ze…is a conversation between the artist and Zimbabwe itself; recently shown in Venice, it will now be shown in Berlin. The photo series Suite Europa takes East Germany and found image templates of Leipzig as its starting point. It is being shown for the first time and was conceived specifically for this exhibition. The second series, Dual Narratives, begins by referring to well-known Italian landscape photographer Pietro Pensa, but achieves its own unique interpretations via image editing and processing. In both series, the artist deals with history and a fascination with historical fragments. Berry Bickle was born in 1959 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Today, she lives and works in Maputo, Mozambique. She studied Fine Art at the Durban Institute of Technology and at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. |
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| Suite Europa | Artists Statement |
The origin of Suite Europa was a box of slides (dia positives ) I bought in a street market in Lisbon. The point of view of the photographer interested me, as the images were impartial, without personal attachment, a distant eye, yet the images carried a suspended emotional value. |
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Suite Europa - City Hall Leipzig |
Both revolutionary and Post Colonial Africa had very specific links to East Germany’s ideologically socialism, it was imbedded in the a historical relation to Africa's independent movements, especially Mozambique. The impulse to work with these original images had a reference to my personal memory, to the ideology of the time, one of fear and mistrust and division. Yet These images were benign street scenes and interiors that had a fantasy quality of a mixture of "old world" and modernism. They exist outside my frame of reference, or rather float in a lost time of an Eastern Europe that in the contemporary is re mapped and integrated in to our understanding of the Europe. As such, they are etherial and refer to only moments in memory. Suite Europe evolved to answer this notion of history, seen through a curtain or a haze of something that has dissolved to unspecific time evoking suspended memory. The amplification of a rich and textural surface in the final photographic image is like a childhood memory, where one is not certain how to trust the memory but to understand its intrinsic value. Berry Bickle, October 2011 |
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| Dual Narratives | Artists Statement | Immagini Pietro Pensa |
A European landscape of mountains and snow is as exotic to me as what must be an African savannah landscape to a European. Working from the images Categoria: Fondo Immagini Pietro Pensa, the constant view of the photographer Pietro Pensa, and his claim to the landscape, of belonging to and living in unchanged for a life time was a strong motivation for the concept of the dual narratives set in these landscape. |
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Immagini Pietro Pensa Nr. 5 |
The word meditations on loss and displacement, float into the certainty of landscape as doubts and threaded uncertainty as expressions of nomadism and passage, of being from other spaces is what composed the concepts for series Immagini Pietro Pensa Berry Bickle, October 2011 |
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| Ze.. | Venice | Artists Statement |
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Zimbabwean Pavilion 54th International Biennale di Venezia. |
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Ze... as a word has no meaning, as a sound it repeats and repeats. Like a cricket at night or a warning whistle. Ze is a visual conversation between myself and a contemporary Zimbabwe. |
My recognition of Zimbabwe as a fractured place, so familiar yet so many threads in a
familiar landscape having being broken or missing leaving gaps or absences. The distance of absence is locked into a contemporary identity of Zimbabwe with the dispersal of families and the fractures in the everyday realties. A simple and personal ritual of washing the body and water frames the personal space of a woman bathing, while the city and the country side merge in a relation of the external view.
Reflecting on the complicated relations between subjectivity, meaning and cultural society. The personal is amplified in small cameos of mirrors and the people in the mirrors are talking to distant family or saying prayers or just having a conversation over distance with the mirror as the reflected image of the present yet evidence of "what has ceased to be". Instead of making reality solid the mirror is an illusio , it reminds us of the world's ever changing nature. Ze was shot in my home town Bulawayo, the spoken language is si'ndebele, I do not intend that there is a translation. Berry Bickle, April 2010 |
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| On the Wire |
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Bamako Encounters African Photography Biennial |
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Interpretive impulses can be located in Berry Bickle’s seductive video piece On the Wire (2009), which allows viewers to voyeuristically watch a shameless young man, clad in a white wedding dress, explore himself before a mirror. The sense of freedom and ambiguity conveyed by his gestures accord with the artist’s intention to, as she explained, leave the work free and open. |
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| New Commitments
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Kota, Gabun Privat collection, Leipzig >> |
Ife, Nigeria Paul Garn Collection,Dresden >> |
Fang, Gabun Collection France >> |
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Sunday Jack Akpan - Nigerian chief |
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Bust of a Nigerian Chief Shown at |
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Galerie Peter Herrmann |
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For 23 years, Galerie Peter Herrmann has provided artists with African roots a platform through which to build a global network. Trade show appearances and international collaborations along with five or six annual exhibitions in Berlin provide a cross-cultural context in which to discuss their multimedia works. As curator, Peter Herrmann has organized more than 300 exhibitions – in his own gallery space as well as in museums and at art associations – and has taken an active stand on cultural policy issues. In 1995, the gallery became Germany’s first to have an Internet presence. With over three million unique visitors and 20 million page views since, the website has become an important source of information. We have sponsored the training of interns and the advanced training of scholarly personnel. Learn more in texts, columns, press clippings and references |
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Galerie Peter Herrmann |
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| Privat collection, Berlin |  |
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