with Katja Petrowskaja, writer
and Arwed Messmer, photographer
Moderated by: Florian Ebner, Chief Curator of Photography at Centre Pompidou, Paris

In their work, photographer Arwed Messmer and writer Katja Petrowskaja approach (everyday) photographs and (archive) images in different ways and work on the visual and / or linguistic (re-)negotiation of their appearance: Arwed Messmer analytically through research, editing and re-contextualisation in the sense of an artistic-image-archaeological practice. Katja Petrowskajas approach is personal, through short prose in which biography, contemporary history and form are condensed in a minimal space, among others into a chronicle of experiences and perspectives on the war in Ukraine.  On the trail of the past as ‘an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized’ (Walter Benjamin), the event moderated by Florian Ebner will also, in a kind of semantic shift, examine or make productive the photographic concept of latency in order to work out the signs hidden in the images or the constantly changing ways of reading the images. 

The matinée What Story? About Remembering and Forgetting and Returning concludes the discursive programme of the EMOP Opening Days. The concept for this event found its starting point in Walter Benjamin's probably most famous and at the same time his last text, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History), which is available as a typescript version in the main festival exhibition of EMOP Berlin, was zwischen uns steht. Fotografie als Medium der Chronik (what stands between us. Photography as a Medium for Chroniciling). Benjamin described the text in a letter to Gretel Adorno as a “bouquet of whispering grasses, gathered on reflective walks”. Another quote from the letter mentioned above demonstrates that the theses are more than just casual notes: “They make me suspect that the problem of remembering (and of forgetting), which appears in them on another level, will continue to occupy me for a long time”. Both the characterisation of the text and its classification seemed to us to be equally close to the methods and ideas of the artist and photographer Arwed Messmer as to those of the writer Katja Petrowskaja.  

On the occasion of the panel, Katja Petrowskaja will read from her book Als wäre es vorbei.Texte aus dem Krieg. 

The event will be followed by a book signing with Katja Petrowskaja and Arwed Messmer.

Publications by the panellists are available in the Akademie der Künste bookshop.