| | | |  | | | Traditional Indian dance mask from the town of Monimbo, adopted by the rebels
during the fight against Somoza to conceal identify. Nicaragua, 1978
© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos | | | | | | CARRYING THE PAST, FORWARD | | | | 9 March – 5 June, 2016 | | | Opening: Tuesday, 8 March, 7pm
Artist Talk: Wednesday, 9 March, 6pm | | |  | | | | | | | | | |  | | | Irak, Kurdistan, 1991
© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos | | | | | | The Fotografie Forum Frankfurt presents central bodies of work by Susan Meiselas, the renowned American photographer. Her first solo exhibition in Germany focuses on the Magnum legend's unique documentary style, making her practice relevant today. The exhibition includes new works developed on site in Frankfurt. Meiselas captures how hardship, violence, and war impacts individuals.
Persecution, displacement, flight, loss of home has for many decades been a focus for the awardwinning American photographer Susan Meiselas (*1948) She has documented those individuals who have been most effected by political and historical events. With "CARRYING THE PAST, FORWARD" the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt presents the first major solo exhibition of the legendary Magnum photographer in Germany. It stages two seminal bodies of work representing Meiselas's oeuvre and, at the same time, connects her practice to current debates surrounding refugees and migration in Europe.
Susan Meiselas is celebrated for her documentary style and her visually compelling storytelling, for which she employs a variety of media. She photographs, carries out interviews, makes films, produces hand-made books with local residents, collects archival material, researchs in existing archives and gathers all to create a new archive of her own. During the course of her projects, she continually returns to the places and people captured with her camera, and photographs, films, and interviews again. Similar to the empirical methodology of a working sociologist, the photo artist conserves historical records and documents historical change. The journey of people – whether refugee or migrant – is for one moment endowed with a sense of temporality. With her images she creates a space within which the photographed person can pause to contemplate, to gain a moment of dignity. The weight of history and the highly personal nature of fate always tend to merge within Susan Meiselas's practice.
"With her unparalleled approach Susan Meiselas has strongly influenced the genre of documentary photography in the twentieth century and has significantly contributed to its further development today," says Celina Lunsford, Artistic Director of the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt. "We are proud to present the first major solo exhibition of this ground-breaking Magnum photographer in Germany." | | | | | |  | | | Monimbo woman carrying her dead husband home to be buried in their backyard. Masaya, Nicaragua, 1979
© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos | | | | | | "CARRYING THE PAST, FORWARD" presents two intricate bodies of work. "Crossings" is comprised of early photographs taken in El Salvador and Nicaragua as well as the US-Mexican border. In the late 1970s Susan Meiselas documented the political upheaval in Central America. In 1979, at the age of 31, Meiselas was awarded the Robert Capa Prize of photojournalism for her documentation of the revolution in Nicaragua. She was the second woman to be honoured with this award. The works shown in Frankfurt give insight to Meiselas’s work since the late 1970s and 80s: Within one decade after her first documentation, Meiselas continued to return to the sites and people she had previously photographed. Like puzzle pieces, the resulting pictures form an all encompassing image representing historical and biographical memory – often the only reminiscence migrants carry with them upon crossing any border.
The second body of work, "Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History" is based on Meiselas’s 1991 documentation of the Anfal campaign in Northern Iraq, the genocide of Kurdish people initiated by Saddam Hussein's regime. The photographer took pictures of the destroyed villages which led to the flight of Kurdish refugees into Turkey and Iran during the Golf War. She accompanied the forensic team of Human Rights Watch to uncover the Kurdish mass graves. Her interest in the history and cultural identity of the Kurdish people grew into a six year research project to gather a visual history of the region. A further important work of this time includes her pioneering website akakurdistan.com, which went online in 1998 (aka="also known as"). The interactive story telling site brings together images and personal memories from the Kurdish population in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey and defines itself as a "borderless space" that "provides the opportunity to build a collective memory" or a suppressed history for a persecuted dispersed ethnic group.
Recent stories have been added to the Frankfurt exhibition through hand-made photo books that Meiselas developed together with refugees in a workshop carried out just shortly before the installation. Together along with earlier individual memory books they form one large-scale cartography recounting Kurdish experiences from the region and Europe. They also help in contributing answers to Susan Meiselas's central questions: What past does one carry with oneself, when one's home, family and everything familiar have to be left behind? Political beliefs? Memories of family or biography? Consciousness, or even pride of identity, nationality? "For those who remain, we rarely ask who they are or why this is the choice they have made. So we pass the silent faces on the street, in the stores, even in our own houses. We see their eyes, but we don’t know what their eyes have seen or what they see in us." Twenty-six years later, Susan Meiselas's words on her series of works "Crossings" in 1990 are now more relevant than ever. | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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