This event was extraordinary for so many reasons and the video gives you a small taste of the discussion ... with Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh from Birzeit Universität, Ramallah, Amnon Raz-Krokotzkin from Ben-Gurion Universität, Beer Sheva, Gabriele Brandstetter from Freie Universität Berlin and A.S. Bruckstein Çoruh from ha’atelier , Berlin.
The Violinist II, Berlin January 19, 2010
It was snowing outside and so we worked with the space we had ...
I interviewed the beautiful Noga while I was in Berlin and so a little of her story will follow in the days ahead but meanwhile, the photo-shoot.
Danke schön , Noga!
It is rare that a photographer is in a position to choose her colleagues and so I truly appeciated the privilege of working with Merit Fakler , the video artist on this project titled TASWIR , during these last 3 months in Berlin.
Merit’s work continuously stunned and delighted me. Our assignment was to record the project - the people, the art, the rooms and the workshops. We found ways to work with and around each other…
Wednesday I’m photographing The Role of the Museum in the Study and Knowledge of Islamic Art – The Past and the Future Mschatta-Saal (Zutritt über den Haupteingang des Pergamonmuseums, AmKupfergraben, 10178 Berlin).
Oleg Grabar (Princeton) is a scholar of Islamic Art and Architecture whose Research has had a profound and far-reaching influence on the field. His books include Epic Images and Contemporary History: The Illustration of The Great Mongol Shahnama (1982); The Mediation of Ornament (1992); The…
Snow seems inextricably linked…
This is the project I’ve been involved in since late October, 2009.
The brainchild of curator, Dr Almut Sh. Bruckstein , the word TASWIR is the Arabic, Persian and Ottoman-Turkish term for mapping, visualizing, describing and outlining. The exhibition has placed classical objects, usually labelled as ‘Islamic art’, in the context of contemporary artist positions in graphics, drawing, painting, photography, video and installation following a narrative parcours which ha’atelier…
Berlin December 26, 2009
An update from Dirk appeared in my comment section and I thought it a good idea to add it to the photograph:
Hafiz Schükri (or Schükrü)was part of the board of the Islamische Gemeinde zu Berlin e.V. (Islamic Community of Berlin) that was founded in 1922. The founder was Abdul Jabbar Kheiri, who lived in Berlin since 1919 - and Schükri was his surrogate as head of the organization. Schükri served, moreover, as religious counselor…
Realising I was fascinated by people and places, my lovely Berliner friend Dirk, took me wandering through his city yesterday ... on a Muslim day out.
Dirk is a Scholar of Jewish and Islamic Studies who lives between Berlin and New York. You will read more of Dirk but later. Anyway, knowing that I had had a small experience of the Jewish side of Berlin, he decided to introduce me to Muslim Berlin, stunning me with the first mosque, pictured…
And this ... well this just made me smile when I read it out on a cold Berlin street this afternoon.
I wonder how many phone calls he received for Italiano lessons.
This photograph was taken inside Kaiser Wilheim Gedachtniskirche. Apparently, this glittering art nouveau-style ceiling mosaic depicts members of the House of Hohenzollern going on pilgrimmage towards the cross ... I looked up and found it beautiful.
I’m curled up carefully on my foam pad bed, this beautiful song playing as I work around packing and project ideas ....
Today was one of those lonely Sundays I can have any place in the world. After a night where sleep didn’t come calling until after 3am, I slept until 10 and imagined I might stay indoors ... but I didn’t. 2pm rolled round and I felt a big dose of cabin fever coming…
And just as I adjust to this Berlin life ... of coffee in my fabulous little Vespress Nero coffee pot, a single bed, no curtains and a spartan kind of existence, it’s time to go home again. This morning I delighted myself by sleeping until 9.30am, a feat rarely achieved any place. I discovered the ice on the window as I heated my coffeee on the little hotplate I have here and muttered as I found myself…
Berlin today - needless to say, I go nowhere without my socks, as per the photograph,the ones quietly tucked away in my Hush Puppy boots.
Today, 17 December 2009, between 5:30 – 7:30 pm you will find me in the Martin-Gropius-Bau Atrium, photographing: Mirror and Veil – ‘Breathing the Water’
In an author’s Reading: Navid Kermani reads from new work - In both his literary and his academic work, Cologne-based author and orientalist scholar Navid Kermani…
It seems that I come fully alive with a camera in my hands ...
I was pondering this while photographing an artist today. Once again, I found myself in the extraordinarily privileged position of documenting a conversation between artist and curator. This is the stuff of life for me. I can hold a 920g camera body, with the additional weight of a 70-200mm zoom lens, for as long as it takes for me to capture whatever it is that I…
Alice is playing with her kittens—a black and a white kitten, the offspring of Dinah, Alice’s cat in the first book—when she ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror (the reflected scene displayed on its surface), and to her surprise, is able to pass through to experience the alternate world. There, she discovers a book with looking-glass poetry, “Jabberwocky”, which she can read only by holding it up to a mirror. Upon leaving the…
This is the place where I spend a lot my Berlin-time. And just so you know, the restaurant is staffed by the loveliest people serving the most excellent food (the potato soup is my favourite but the pasta was exquisite that time too) and the gift shop has an incredible selection of books, often with a good selection on special.
The Martin Gropius Bau was in west Germany but only just. If you look at…
William Forsythe and the portraits of Palestinian martyrs by artist Taysir Batniji
The context was, ‘Human Rights’ as an act of writing, the nomadic existence of the Palestinian art scene, the loss of language and memory, the…
I brought so much work with me, it almost surprised to get through check-in without being over the luggage allowance but no, my work is the 1000s of photographs I have on my laptop and backed-up all over the place.
I told no one I was returning, no one but Gert and so Jessie and Sahara almost fell over when they opened the door to me last night. I’m home for 2 weeks this time, and it’s a trip as…
When Rainer, the wood-worker, wandered off to find his business card for me, I couldn’t resist taking this shot of his wood-working equipment.
The yellow out-of-focus building in the background of this image is the Akademie der Künste, in Pariser Platz and it is the location of the exhibition titled Ground Beneath My Feet, Not the Sky ... part of a long-term project,with the title: Istanbul Next Wave .
Inside are some of the 250 pieces by 88 Turkish artists being displayed in two locations in the center of Berlin in the coming months and in particular. This exhibition, Ground…
I have updated the About section of my website ... having woken at 4am with a growing list of things I must do.
It seems these small hours of a morning are a good place to find the peace required to work.
I’ll leave you with a favourite image taken here in Berlin.
We wandered today, this was one of the sights seen ...
Who allowed me to take photographs freely ... thank you Rainer.
At the U2 Stadtmitte stop.
I love the way sculptures aren’t coy about having their photograph taken ...
When wandering, my life seems always to revolve around the people I meet, the places I see and the books that I find ... almost always, and Berlin has been no exception.
I am reading those 4 books mentioned previously, smiling as they fall over one another but then today, I had one of those ‘didn’t-see-it-coming’ kind of days, common enough here but beautiful, as is often the case.
It began at the exhibition , where we met…
I’m inside the advancing light, my hands are hungry, the world beautiful. Nazim Hikmet
Gert and I had spent 6 hours exploring a part of what used to be East Berlin, dragged ourselves in, recovered a little, looked through our photographs and…
We die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we’ve entered and swum up like rivers. Fears we’ve hidden in - like this wretched cave. I want all this marked on my body. Where the real countries are. Not boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men. I know you’ll come carry me out to the Palace of Winds. That’s what I’ve wanted: to walk in such a place with you. With friends, on an…
Turn your volume up loud if you visit this youtube of the Skazka Orchestra playing Bormental . They played at the Bar Mitzvah last night and the people danced ... oh how they danced.
Skazka Orchestra present a wild explosion fusing together traditional melodies (polka, folk) with modern rhythms (ska, klezmer, jazz, pop, punk and reggae. How do I write of it All ... November 22, 2009
I returned to Berlin Thursday and blogged of books bought ...
Friday I attended my very first Bar Mitzvah at the Synagogue and almost died as the beauty of the Jewish religious ceremony unfolded in front of me.
I never knew that a cantor sings the service, and not just any singer but an incredibly special singer. His voice was exquisite and I had to keep checking my mouth wasn’t falling open as I lost myself in following his…
The flight from Brussels is just one hour and ten minutes and so very easy to make ... so far.
I arrived, unpacked very fast and then headed out into the Berlin sunshine, full of smiles over my return.
I walked to Marga Schoeller’s exquisite bookshop on Knesebeckstrasse, and fell on two books before my money runs out. While this isn’t the way an adult should conduct themselves, it is surely entirely appropriate for…
The need to travel is a mysterious force. A desire to go runs through me equally with an intense desire to stay at home. An equal and opposite thermodynamic principle.
I’m not sure…
I was searching through last year’s project work and found this too ...
Two weeks into this project and I’ve been offered the chance to return home for a week. A workshop was cancelled ... and so, unexpectedly, I’m heading back to Belgium to regroup and work out what I need to bring back for this Berlin life. Definitely more clothes, thicker heavier warmer than before. I return and stay until 21 December, flying home then returning to Berlin for 10 days after Christmas.
This world is full of the most incredible art…
I was fortunate to not only meet Ali Kaaf but photograph him too. And it was a pleasure.
Ali is exhibiting work in the exhibition TASWIR: Pictorial Mappings of Modernity and Islam , in the Martin-Gropius-Bau from November 4 till January 18, 2010.
I found this group really rather beautiful and couldn’t resist photographing them as they sat there on the stairs inside the Martin Gropius Bau here in Berlin.
I loved the way this woman’s hat matched in with the colour of my photographs here in this shot.
The opening was superb. Here’s a small taste ...
The New York Times is running an interactive feature on readers memories of the Berlin Wall and I have to confess, American English is the most common English I hear when I’m on the subway or wandering through Potsdamer Platz. Anyway, I must try and check some of this out in the days ahead ...
My favourite New Zealand radio journalist, Kim Hill, interviewed John Leslie on what was probably the best…
My Work is a trial to break down many barriers, such as the one between people and a classical work of art… Buthayna Ali , Artist.
Buthayna Ali’s installation, titled we ,nous, نحن is a stunning work to view in real life however this link gives you a taste ...
And if you find yourself in Berlin her work is part of the Ha’atelier Platform for Philosophy and Art exhibition titled Etel Adnan, Berlin 2009 November 06, 2009
“As for any serious writer, the audience of an Arab–American cannot be confined to his or her fellow Arabs. Books have a life of their own and no one can determine their fate. The only thing we can strive for consciously is to be aware of the existence of a growing body of Arab–American literature, try to know it and make it known.” Etel Adnan , Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist.
In 2003 MELUS, the…
How do you write of a day where you started out photographing Joseph Semah, listening as he talked with all kinds of interesting people. And yesterday ... I was called out to photograph Etel Adnan talking with Ali Kaaf, and that was delicious too.
This afternoon was all about a book signing and I’ve already devoured the book by Maliheh Afnan and she was extraordinary too. She…
I have two huge tasks today. ... my photographs start going up at 8.30am, or so we were hoping last night. And then I have to photograph every room there,within a short period of time so that everyone else involved in this particular task can get their work complete in time for the Taswir Exihibition opening tonight.
Must go ...
Those first days in Istanbul were truly difficult and it was a place where I could never quite find my ease as my New…
I almost giggled to myself but remembered it would just make me seem slightly mad, giggling as I wandered, almost lost, in Berlin’s metro. There I was, making my way through the metro, map in hand, hoping that this first time going ‘home’ alone would be a success. And of course, it was. Gert had made maps and I had been once each way with Berliners however ... I am special when it comes to getting myself around new cities…
To say my world has become dramatically different in these Berlin-based days would not be an exaggeration ... not even a hint of an exaggeration.
Ad each day I make notes to research what I don’t know in the free time I don’t have.
As photographer, I have been offered an entry point into a world of curators and artists and an exposure to contemporary and ancient art works ... a window into a world I enjoy in the same…
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.
I have come to this new city with a Gert-made series of maps, one of which shows…
I didn’t sleep so well last night, nervous about leaving home for 2 months I think ... and so it was that I slept all the way to Berlin. Perhaps an hour and 10 minutes isn’t the longest sleep but it was enough to disorientate me.
I arrived at the place I’ll be living for the next 2 months and began the process of making a nest in this unfurnished apartment but that is a huge story, too long for…
It could be said that I am entirely allergic to shopping ...
I’m fine with searching for books and can spend hours in Antwerpen bookshops but putting together ‘a look’ or a winter wardrobe ... not to mention organising something for this winter in Berlin ... that terrifies me.
Today, I headed into the city with an impressive ‘to-do’ list and then after crossing off many things, I popped into Paprika , my favourite clothes shop. …
This is one of my favourite squares here in the city of Antwerp .
The triangular shape of Grote Markt reveals that this square was once ancient Frankish municipal ground. Frankish , as in city planning from something like the 4th century AD when the Franks, otherwise known as the fierce ones , ruled the area.
The Town Hall is located in Grote Markt and nearby, you find all the exquisite guild houses, still adorned with the symbols of their former…
