Decades after World War II, Rosemarie Zens returned for the frst time to the town in today’s Poland where she was born. In 1945, when she was just a young child, her mother, like many other refugees, had been forced to fee with her. She embarked on a search for clues about her early life, a quest for the meaning of origins and memory, for the frst formative experiences. With her camera, she captured the things that drew her attention: the expanses of meadow, the paths into the unknown, the silhouettes of night-time shadows. Mysterious and ethereal landscape photographs mingle with photos from family albums, intertwining fragmentary memories with pictorial inventions.

Before she began working on her free-lance photography projects, Rosemarie Zens worked as a teacher, psychotherapist and writer and this background is recognizable in all her works. In The Sea Remembers , the artist pursues the link to the blind spots of early childhood, which are difcult to connect with concrete places.Thus the houses in the mist, the frost-covered meadows or the hollow forest paths become inner landscapes rhythmically interwoven with photographs from her family archive to make up non-linear narrative strands. This results mainly in open pictorial works that enable the viewer to sense far-distant mental states and connect them with his or her own experiences.

“It is said that there is a cellular memory, that cell water is laden with meaningful powers, that traces of memory, measured and mapped and reaching far back into the past, are stored in it and are seeking the way to physical experience. But our place of origin eludes us when we try to pin it down. Then it changes like the sea, which invents nothing yet takes on diferent forms. Just as our consciousness and memory strive to constantly reassure us, to re-orient us through memories and to temporarily establish for us an order of things and images”, Rosemarie Zens writes in her essay in the book published to accompany the exhibition.

PhotoWerkBerlin is delighted to be able to show this exhibition at their project space for the first time in Berlin, after stops in Boston and Osnabrück.

Framework program

Opening Reception: Tuesday, April 24, 7 pm
Opening Remarks:
Elke von der Lieth | Kommunale Galerie Berlin
Norbert Wiesneth | PhotoWerkBerlin
Introduction:
Prof. Klaus Honnef | Art Critic

Sunday, May 6, 2 pm:
Artist Talk (held in German) with Rosemarie Zens and curator Norbert Wiesneth.

Sunday, June 3, 2 pm:
Rosemarie Zens in conversation (held in German) with photographer Artur Urbanski (Łodz) about collective memories.

Presented by PhotoWerkBerlin | Projektraum and Kommunale Galerie Berlin.

April 25 — June 10, 2018
Opening Reception: Tuesday, April 24, 7 pm
+ Framework program: see above

Projektraum | PhotoWerkBerlin

Hohenzollerndamm 176, 10713 Berlin
[Wilmersdorf | Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf]

Tue – Fri 10 am – 5 pm, Wed 10 am – 7 pm, Sun 11 am – 5 pm

Admission free