From 28 February 2025, the Akademie der Künste in Hanseatenweg will be showing the exhibition ‘Ein Dorf 1950 – 2022. Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler und Ludwig Schirmer’, a cross-generational, long-term photographic documentation of the village of Berka in Thuringia.
Image above: Ludwig Schirmer, aus der Serie Ein Dorf, 1950–1960 © Ludwig Schirmer/OSTKREUZ
The exhibition ‘A village 1950 – 2022. Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler and Ludwig Schirmer’ is a long-term project by three photographers and at the same time a family history that highlights aspects of time and change in a special way. The project has its origins in Berka in Thuringia and yet points far beyond the borders of this village. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ludwig Schirmer, Ute Mahler’s father, worked as a master miller in Berka, but photography was his great passion. A few years after the end of the Second World War, he began documenting everyday life, the festivals and his life in the village. Without knowing his father-in-law’s pictures, Werner Mahler decided to photograph his diploma thesis at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts in Berka in 1977. In 1998, the magazine Der Stern asked him to update his work to show the changes after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fourth group of works, photographed by Ute Mahler in Berka in 2021/22, can be seen as a familial successor to the three other photographic projects and is at the same time an independent view.
All four works show a place over a period of 70 years. They pose questions about continuity and change, about home, childhood, about moving away and coming back, about old and new, about the familiar and the unfamiliar.
An exhibition as part of the EMOP Berlin – European Month of Photography
WHEN?
Opening: Thursday, 27 February 2025, 7 pm
Exhibition dates: Friday, 28 February – Sunday, 4 May 2025
Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday, 2 – 7 pm, Saturday – Sunday, 11 am – 7 pm
WHERE?
Akademie der Künste
Hanseatenweg 10
10557 Berlin
COST?
10 EUR/reduced 7 EUR
Opening: free admission
Up to 18 years, every Tuesday, every first Sunday of the month: free admission
