12 Star Gallery, London

Photographs by Gundula Schulze Eldowy
Curated by Matthew Shaul
3 - 13 November 2009

Marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gundula Schulze- Eldowy’s photographs, produced in the community of Berlin-Mitte between 1979 and 1987 capture the decline of socialist society with a plaintive, startling poetry.

Documenting a world whose infrastructure is close to collapse, she conveys impressions completely unfamiliar to British audiences: Germans represented as victims (rather than perpetrators) of the war, and a community still so traumatised forty years after the final Soviet assault on Berlin that its people have, as she has put it, ‘lost their ability to dream’.

Representing an uncompromising barometer of the preoccupations of ordinary East Germans her photographs pulled sharply away from the socialist state’s idealised worldview and the ‘paradise for workers and peasants’ that it provided. Trained at Leipzig’s highly regarded High School for Graphics and Book Arts she developed an aesthetic which both exploded the myth of the ‘heroic worker’ and offered up the surprising intimacies of the private sphere as a foil to the regimented Stalinism of state culture.

Schulze-Eldowy’s work featured prominently in the UK touring exhibition Do Not Refreeze 2007-9 and is currently included in the Exhibition Art of Two Germanys at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

The exhibition is organised by the University of Hertfordshire Galleries in collaboration with the German Embassy in London.

For more information please see http://www.europe.org.uk/culture/events/view/-/id/497/