Béatrice Klein: Béatrice Klein Vita→ Vita
De unde vin
Where I come from

June 30 to September 16, 2010

A new series of exhibitions at Hilaneh von Kories Gallery called NEXT GENERATION will showcase a set of young talented photo artists. First on display will be Hamburg based Béatrice Klein. Her show “De unde vin – Where I come from” will open on June 30 and run until September 16.

Ms. Klein was born 1977 in the Romanian town of Oradea near the Hungarian border. In the early eighties her family left the country and found a new home in Germany. Many years later she went back to Romania and took her camera with her to trace back memories of her childhood. At the same time she wanted to find an answer to the question: Do the images she kept in her head match today’s reality?

What she recorded on old-fashioned film are slurred and excursive tableaus, just like her memories. Their mysterious blurriness and their reflections, captured and unaltered by any post-production retouches, seem to exist in a space between true autobiographical renderings and fictional creations. Some photos are dark, almost black, pointing into a past, which is close to being lost completely.

These scenes are no snapshots in time, but rather poetic fragments in which the atmosphere itself is the predominating characteristic. Her depictions of every day village life in Hemeiusi, where her mother was born and where Ms. Klein visited her aunt Ileana, capture people, buildings, interiors that look like they did decades ago. What has changed is the person behind the camera whose personal approach to the discovery is subtle, associative and puzzling.

“I wanted to see how they live and how my life might have looked like. I discovered a world, which I am not familiar with, but which somehow belongs to me and is rooted inside me.”

The result is a “blurred archive of my memories”, Ms. Klein has said admitting that they articulate a desire to learn more: Who are these people? What is their relationship to the photo artist? We don’t really know, but we suspect that apart from a noticable alienation connections still exist and have never been cut off.

The exhibit presents 25 C prints mounted on aludibond shot with a medium format Zenza Bronica camera.

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