On 15 November 2024, a pop-up exhibition by the Helmut Newton Foundation with new works by Aino Kannisto and Karen Stuke opened at Hotel Bogota.
Image above: Untitled (Hand Mirror), from the series Hotel Bogota, 2013, © Aino Kannisto, Courtesy Galerie m, Bochum.
The legendary Berlin photographer Yva had her spacious photo studio there 100 years ago, and Helmut Newton was her apprentice at this location between 1936 and 1938; it later became the Hotel Bogota. Its last hotel manager, Joachim Rissmann, left Yva’s photo studio as it was originally, as a tribute to this legendary photographer and to photography as a medium. He also later acquired numerous vintage prints by Yva, some of which are on loan to the Helmut Newton Foundation’s “Berlin, Berlin” exhibition on the first floor in parallel to this exhibition in the project space.
Most of these fashion pictures of Yva were taken in her studio in Schlüterstrasse in the early 1930s, which later became the Hotel Bogota. The two self-portraits of Helmut Newton were also taken there in 1936; one in a lab coat, the other with a hat and coat, like the “roving reporter” Egon Erwin Kisch, whom Newton admired as a teenager; these portraits are also hanging in the exhibition “Berlin, Berlin”.
This almost mythical place – Yva’s former studio, later the Hotel Bogota – also became a place of longing and a place to take pictures for later photographers, including Aino Kannisto and Karen Stuke, who realised two very individual self-portrait series there shortly before the hotel closed in 2012 and 2013. Both photographed themselves in different rooms of the hotel: Kannisto slips into different roles, wears new clothes again and again, some of them appear somewhat mysterious, almost like a film scene, sometimes with a contemplative or melancholy looking actress.
Through the staging and role-playing, the photographer becomes a fictional narrator with great visual presence, a protagonist and director in one; in this respect, these staged everyday situations are not self-portraits in the true sense of the word. Her Bogota series was created over the course of a year, on several one- to two-week trips to Berlin, at the invitation of Joachim Rissmann. Aino Kannisto thus had access to all the rooms of the hotel and appropriated each of these special places.
In her work, it is only through her intense preoccupation with the place itself that she concretises the fictional situations, which are copied from everyday life; only then does she decide on a particular wardrobe and hairstyle, props and point of view. She seems to have been completely alone in the Hotel Bogota, sometimes we are even reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”, because something unexpected could happen in the next moment. There are other references and associations to the history of art, film and photography, but her work is nevertheless very independent in its subtle intensity.
Karen Stuke, on the other hand, remains almost invisible in her self-portraits. Using a self-constructed camera obscura, or rather several such simple pinhole cameras, her main tool, she photographed herself during her nightly sleep, with exposure times lasting for hours. The artist’s sleep thus determined the length of the negative exposure, sometimes it was only two hours, usually seven; after waking up, usually without an alarm clock, she closed or covered the simple pinhole aperture of the camera, and in this respect the entire period is inscribed in the photographs as overlapping layers of time, as it were.
With this project at the Hotel Bogota, Stuke continued an earlier series of paintings entitled “Sleeping Sister”, in which she referred to the successful novel “Schlafes Bruder” by Robert Schneider. The book in turn refers to Greek mythology, to Hypnos, the god of sleep, and his brother Thanatos, the god of death. Against this background, Stuke’s Bogota series refers to the chequered history of the building in Charlottenburg’s Schlüterstrasse – from Yva’s studio to the National Socialist Reich Chamber of Culture and, after 1945, as a place for the denazification of German cultural workers to the Hotel Bogota.
Also at the invitation of Joachim Rissmann, who also created the legendary exhibition platform “Fotoplatz” on the ground floor, the Berlin photographer occupied almost all of the hotel’s rooms one after the other, night after night. In an installative hanging, she now shows 24 results of her night’s rest, always a room, an interior with a bed in which a person, namely herself, must have turned round several times, as the traces of movement of the long-term exposure prove.
Next to it, as the right-hand part of the individual diptychs, Stuke hangs the original escape route signs from this room, which she was allowed to unscrew shortly before the hotel closed. In the hotel itself, some rooms were also furnished with original paintings, for example there was a René Burri room and room 418 with works by Helmut Newton. Both rooms are part of the picture tableau, which the artist constantly rearranges to suit the specific location. In front of them are carpets from the former Hotel Bogota.
This presentation thus closes a circle in several ways, with the reference to Yva and Newton – and the large group exhibition on the first floor of the museum. Finally, we also encounter Helmut Newton himself in the Hotel Bogota, photographed by Joachim Rissmann, on the legendary staircase in Yva’s former studio, where numerous fashion pictures of Yva were also created. Newton was a contemporary witness at the time and later also photographed fashion and nude images on such stairs in his work, congenially continuing Yva’s work into the contemporary.
WHEN?
Opening: Thursday, 14. November 2024, 6:00 pm
Exhibition dates: Friday, 15. November 2024 – Sunday, 16. February 2025
WHERE?
Hotel Bogota
Schlüterstrasse 45,
10707 Berlin
