C/O Berlin | Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin »Don’t Start With The Good Old Things But The Bad New Ones«

War, violence, terror, murder, homicide – a bloody trail of brutality runs through human history. In every society, conflicts have long been crucial narratives anchored deep in individual and collective consciousness. But how are they documented and disseminated through the media? In a kind of re-enactment, artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin reinterpret the Holy Bible and Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer in such a way that they juxtapose concrete accounts of violence with shocking photographs, superimposing the text over large areas. The result produces an effect of distortion using materials from the Archive of Modern Conflict as well as photographs found in the Internet; it not only questions the role of the visual author and his or her position situated between enlightenment, personal involvement and propaganda, but also works against an unthinking reception of text and image. Hence the artist duo challenges the viewers’ habits of seeing and turns them into critical observers who do not passively get lost in history. 

The exhibition, curated by Ann-Christin Bertrand includes approximately 90 images, and will open on the occasion of the 7th European Month of Photography, along with the launch of Broomberg & Chanarin’s new book, Humans and Other Animals (Menschen und andere Tiere), published in German translation by Kehrer.

Read more about the exhibition on the websites of C/O Berlin and EMOP Berlin 2016.

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Adam Broomberg was born in Johannesburg in 1970, and moved to London to pursue his studies. Oliver Chanarin was born in London in 1971, and later moved to South Africa where the two first met, in the 1990s. They worked as photographers and visual artists for Colors magazine before founding their own studio in London. Together they have published nine monographs, including Holy Bible, Spirit is a Bone, and War Primer 2. They are professors of Photography at HFBK, Hamburg, and teach at KABK in The Hague. In 2013 they were awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, and in 2014 the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography. Their works have been exhibited around the world and are located in important public and private collections, including Tate Modern, The Museum of Modern Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, International Center of Photography, Musée de l’Elysée, and the Stedelijk Museum.

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