Frédéric Brenner Zerheilt

Following more than forty years of photographic storytelling of Jewish life around the world, Frédéric Brenner spent three years exploring Berlin -- a stage for a vast spectrum of expressions and performances of Judaism. In his new photographic essay he portrays individuals -- newcomers, old timers, converts, immigrants and others – who have made Berlin their home or are just passing through. Via a series of fragmentary insights into this incubator of paradox and dissonance, he reflects on conflicting narratives of redemption and gives light to an ever so present absence. Like a shattered mirror, these images offer a polyphonic, sometimes bizarre and disturbing reflection of and on a topography of displacement and estrangement in contemporary human condition, far beyond the story of Berlin or of Jews.

FRÉDÉRIC BRENNER (*1959) is known for exploring questions of longing, belonging and exclusion. His major opus, Diaspora: Homelands in Exile is the result of a twenty-five-year search in over forty countries to create a visual record of the Jewish people at the end of the twentieth century. He has published seven books, his most recent book is An Archeology of Fear and Desire (2014). He lives in Berlin and Jerusalem.