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Belonging to the series Dreams and Disappointments from the mid-2000s, all three works by Jyrki Parantainen in the Stiftung Reinbeckhallen’s current exhibition, a touch of playfulness, are images of images. For decades, the conceptual artist has been photographing landscapes and staged scenes that he then overlays with words and sentences and alters by adding pins and metal wires to their surfaces. By incorporating language and additional materials into his photographic work, Parantainen presents viewers with a chain of associations and invites them to consider what is not pictured.

Accessibility is undeniably one of printmaking’s most important features. From its production to its reception, this art form offers an enormous potential to provoke cultural and socio-political debate. Aligned with the interest of nurturing social discourses, with the activities of the Reinbeckhallen’s onsite printing workshop Werkstatt Neue Drucke and in dialogue with the exhibition program, a collection of 15 posters from a film and graphics portfolio, edited by the Taller Experimental de Grafica de la Habana, was purchased by the Stiftung Reinbeckhallen in 2018.

This acquisition was the result of the first closer cooperation of the Stiftung Reinbeckhallen with the Werkstatt Neue Drucke – coordinated since 2017 by Ulrike Koloska at the Reinbeckhallen – in the context of Otro amanecer en el trópico, an exhibition which presented a reflection on the contemporary artistic practices in and around Cuba.

In preparation for the exhibition, a research trip to Havana led by the curator Tereza de Arruda provided an overview of the artistic and cultural scene on the capital of the island, based on the one hand on the state institutions and on the other on the non-institutionalized art initiatives and the artists themselves.

After completing an apprenticeship in photography in Potsdam in the late 1950s, East German photographer Roger Melis began working as a scientific photographer at the Charité, a hospital in East Berlin. Around the same time, Melis was asked to photograph German artists, writers, and singers for a book that was regrettably never realized. Despite this, his photographs were widely seen and celebrated at the time, so much so that by the end of the 1960s, when he was sought after by publications on both sides of the Berlin Wall, Melis decided to leave the hospital to work solely as a freelance photographer.

Several of these portraits, including one striking image of Christa Wolf from 1968, belong in the collection of the Stiftung Reinbeckhallen. In this black and white photograph, the admired East German writer is seen leaning against a chair in the comfort of her own apartment with her hands clasped together and eyes staring intently at the photographer and his camera. It is one of many portraits taken by Melis that places—both then and now—a spotlight on East Germany’s prominent cultural figures.

Nina Ansari (b. 1981 in Tehran) has created an extensive oeuvre comprised of installations, paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photography. With this complexity, she reserves an artistic and conceptual freedom. As different as these media are, they are united through the conceptual approach as well as Ansari´s biography, which runs like a thread through her work.

Her family fled to Germany during the first Gulf War when Ansari was four years old. A key moment for her in Iran was, when the interior of her house was briefly lit up by bomb blasts. The flash of light led to a new perception of reality. In her theoretical and photographic thesis Der Blick in die Fotografie (2010), Ansari dealt with the sense of sight, the human eye and the concept of seeing and gazing by examining the complexity of our perception with a camera. She described her role as an artist as an active one, the camera as a weapon, the approach as a conceptual one. The goal was to define the scope of photography. Today in retrospective she says, that she has exhausted this topic and thus answered the subject of photography for herself.

In the mid-1960s, Sibylle Bergemann began her foray into photography by documenting windows, a subject that she would return to throughout her career, and by learning as much as she could about the medium from Arno Fischer, Elisabeth Meinke, Roger Melis, Brigitte Voigt, and Michael Weidt, all members of Gruppe DIREKT. By the end of the decade, Bergemann was regularly accepting assignments from East German illustrated magazines, including Sibylle: Die Zeitschrift für Mode und Kultur.