{"id":2416,"date":"2022-07-08T21:42:47","date_gmt":"2022-07-08T19:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kimknoppers.nl\/?p=2416"},"modified":"2023-08-08T11:44:26","modified_gmt":"2023-08-08T09:44:26","slug":"jutta-benzenberg-_-albanian-biography-from-now-to-1991","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kimknoppers.nl\/index.php\/2022\/07\/jutta-benzenberg-_-albanian-biography-from-now-to-1991\/","title":{"rendered":"Jutta Benzenberg – Albanian Biography. From Now to 1991"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commissioned by<\/strong>
\nMarubi National Museum of Photography, Shkod\u00ebr, Albania<\/a><\/p>\n

Curator<\/strong>
\nKim Knoppers<\/p>\n

Artist<\/strong>
\nJutta Benzenberg<\/p>\n

Date<\/strong>
\n08.07 -13.11.2022<\/p>\n

Jutta Benzenberg (1960, Munich, Germany) often gives a stage to people who are often not seen but need acknowledgment. People who do not live in the city but in villages and mountains, people who do not conform to the norms of a patriarchal society, people who live nomadic lives, people who deal with individual or collective traumas. Her ability to connect with people from different backgrounds is key in this.<\/p>\n

After studying photography at the Staatliche Fachakademie f\u00fcr Photo Design in Munich and commissions for magazines, theaters, and television, Benzenberg intuitively made a major decision in 1991 that determined the rest of her life. Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she reads in the newspaper about Albania, a forgotten country on the edge of Europe. Its final fall of the communist regime creates a vacuum that fills with chaos, turbulence, and directionlessness. Benzenberg wants to capture how people manage to cope in this situation. With writer, linguist, albanologist, and activist Ardian Klosi (1957-2012) she makes her first trip through the country. This journey results in the book Albanian Uberleben (1993), many other trips, a marriage, and a family with Klosi. Her way of working reflects this period: black and white, chaotic, harsh, fast, and intuitive. For her books Sombre Beauty (2004), Ahead with the Past (2011) and God in Albania (2020) she still photographs scenes and people while ‘on the road’. But now she first asks permission from people before she photographs them. She puts them in a quickly improvised portrait studio on location: against a dark background or in the landscape, always with the right falling daylight. Faces, eyes, souls. For an instant, she makes real contact and thus comes close to their essence. Her portraits express pride, liveliness, depth, modesty, lust for life, and willingness. Sometimes they also reflect circumstances that are not easy, but always speak with dignity and grace.<\/p>\n

In essence, Jutta Benzenberg’s photographs are a visual search of the Albanian condition humaine. What does it mean to be human in Albania? What challenges does (wo)man have to overcome during their lives? What is the influence of the circumstances of the land on the identity of its people? This exhibition forms both their Albanian biography and that of Benzenberg, in which her professional and private life intertwine. Together, the photographs form a subject narrative with highs and lows, broad horizons, and details, which elaborated on Albania’s identity through Benzenberg’s eyes and that also revealed her personality.<\/p>\n

The exhibition starts on the ground floor in the present and takes the visitor loosely chronologically back in time on the first floor, to a more turbulent recent past that seems far away but sometimes still shines through the cracks. Jutta Benzenberg herself talks in the exhibition about the backgrounds of her series, the special encounters she had and the way she conducts photography. This can be listened to (English) via the QR codes near the series or read (Albanian) via the handout. Together her photographs and stories form a biography of Albania through her eyes. At the same time, they are a reflection of her own biography and testify to the extensive career of one of Albania’s most active photographers.<\/p>\n

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