Frédéric Brenner
Photographer
Frédéric Brenner is an internationally acclaimed photographer, known for exploring questions of longing, belonging and exclusion for over four decades. His major opus, Diaspora, Homelands in Exile, is the result of a 25-year search in over 40 countries to create a visual record of the Jewish people at the end of the 20th century, a case study of the human condition. Initially intended to chronicle vanishing Jewish communities, the project evolved into a probing examination of the multiple, dissonant identities of a scattered people.
Brenner initiated an international photographic project, This Place, in which he invited eleven other artists to join him in exploring Israel and the West Bank as place and metaphor. His own contribution is entitled An Archeology of Fear and Desire.
His new photographic essay, ZERHEILT: HEALED TO PIECES, explores Berlin as a vast spectrum of expressions and performances of Jewishness. Via a series of fragmentary insights into this incubator of paradox and dissonance, he reflects on conflicting narratives of redemption and sheds light on an ever-so-present absence. Like a shattered mirror, these images offer a polyphonic, sometimes bizarre and disturbing reflection of and on a topography of displacement and estrangement, far beyond the story of Berlin or of Jews.
Frédéric Brenner; photo: Ali Ghandtschi
Jewishness. Otherness. Performance. A Photographic Reflection by Frédéric Brenner, 2020. Moderator: Mr. Oren Weinberg, Director, National Library of Israel
