After more than five years of forced labor in the coal mines of the Soviet labor camp Vorkuta, Lothar Wolleh (1930–1979) returned to Berlin as a free man in January 1956. Among his belongings were a few pictures secretly created during his imprisonment in the Gulag.

It was precisely in this inhospitable place north of the Arctic Circle, just a few kilometres from the Polarwolf camp where Alexei Navalny died, that Wolleh experienced light as an ‘elixir of life’ and as a medium of presence and absence. The camera as a ‘light catcher’ became an instrument that enabled him to make the invisible visible.

During the Cold War, Wolleh travelled once again to the Soviet Union. The exhibition presents the photographs from his imprisonment and juxtaposes them with portraits of people from all across the Soviet Union. They remind us that individual humanity remains alive even in times of the greatest hostility and must be made visible in order to overcome what divides us.