In the organizer's words:

Keep your ears to the ground! Gundula Schulze Eldowy and Robert Frank

The encounter with the American photographer Robert Frank in East Berlin in 1985 became a key moment for Gundula Schulze Eldowy: with her eye for outsiders and the marginalized, the combination of social documentary photography with poetry and her unconditional independence, Robert Frank and Gundula Schulze Eldowy instantly discovered their artistic affinity.

Born in Erfurt in 1954 and a graduate of the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, she refused to be constrained by any dogma from the outset. Her pictures of East Berlin, where the traces of war are still omnipresent, and her nude portraits, which are unsparing yet sensitive and full of dignity, are provocative. On the other side of the Iron Curtain is the Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank (1924-2019), who drew a sobering counter-image to the American Dream in his 1958 photo book The Americans and is still considered a pioneer of documentary photography today. The two began an intensive exchange of letters across continents and borders.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the young photographer accepted Robert Frank's invitation to New York, the Mecca of the avant-garde. There she experiences the free spirit of the art and beatnik scene. Her visual aesthetics changed radically. She used new techniques, experimented with Polaroid and video, double exposures and material processing to give form to Manhattan's hall of mirrors of impressions and the feeling of liberation. Her photographs are no longer committed to immediate reality, but search for expanded fluid forms of consciousness.

The exhibition reconstructs Gundula Schulze Eldowy's development from East Berlin to New York, from straight photography to a poetic visual language that expresses itself in the fusion of photography, film, painting and poetry into an artistic cosmos. Around 230 photographs by Gundula Schulze Eldowy and Robert Frank as well as films, diary entries and documents will be presented as a dialog between the two artistic personalities. In the film installation The Beast in Me is Germany, director Helke Misselwitz creates a portrait of photographer Gundula Schulze Eldowy based on her artistic development since the 1980s.

The exhibition also provides an opportunity to return to the work of Robert Frank, who would have been 100 years old this year. On March 2 and 3, a two-day program will present his extensive film oeuvre in the Studio (Hanseatenweg) - curated and presented by Alexander Horwath and Regina Schlagnitweit (Vienna).

Supported by funds from the Capital Cultural Fund