If you look at the large-format prints by photographer Johanna-Maria Fritz, to be installed in the Hopscotch Reading Room in Schöneberg on 23.11.23, you’ll see beige, sand, and dust. You’ll feel texture, warmth, and shadow. You’ll feel wonder, awe, curiosity. Perhaps you’ll ponder and ask yourself: What is a story? The things we tell or the things we leave out? What is memory? Narration? Document? Testimony? What is true? What is real? What is beautiful? And what does all this mean in a time when images are racing, and the news is pushing when everything is available every second and yet forgotten as soon as we click on it? Marie-Kristin Thiele, creative director and founder of the poster label From, must have had this and more on her mind when she first came across the work of the Ostkreuz graduate, who lives between Berlin and the Middle East, and invited her to open her newly founded poster project, which will now launch high-quality art poster editions at regular intervals. Thiele finds the motifs for this in existing documentary archives, always looking for outtakes “that are too subtle, too blatant or simply too beautiful” to have made it into a previous publication.
Aesthetics and authenticity manifested in curated prints and images that tell stories. The motifs by Johanna-Maria Fritz, which will be launched next Thursday, tell this story: The sculptor Jumua al-Hamu from Rakka, Syria, buried his art in the ground during the rule of the Islamic State: under Sharia law, any art was forbidden. Now that the jihadists have been driven out and despite corruption, mistrust, and the risk of renewed fighting, his art is returning to the light of day. And perhaps now in the living rooms of Berliners or under the Christmas trees of their loved ones. Incidentally, part of the proceeds will go directly to al-Hamu. In the spirit of the project. Or as Thiele says: “From connects us with the world. With real pictures and true stories.”
Text: Hilka Dirks / Credit: FROM
From Editions Launch at Hopscotch Reading Room, Kurfürstenstr.14/Haus B, 10785 Berlin–Schöneberg; map
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