„Bread“
with „Poetry like bread“ by Thilo Seibt
Fotoatelier am Schönen Berg
Mansteinstr. 16
10783 Berlin-Schöneberg
exhibition
16.06. – 30.06.2019
opening time
Sat/Sun 14:00 – 18:00
Vernissage
Fr. 15.06.2019 ab 19:00
Bread
BREAD is a cultural asset and an indispensable staple food in large parts of the world. In the Paleolithic Age at the latest, grain was ground into flour and then probably boiled or baked to make the grains edible. The oldest remains of bread ever found are over 14,400 years old.
But BREAD is more than crust and crumb, more than flour, yeast, water, salt and heat.
BREAD is a feeling, a memory, is childhood, family and community. BREAD is a symbol and sacred to many. BREAD is also a metaphor and subject in art. Artists have repeatedly dealt with BREAD – from Man Ray to Salvador Dalí, from Käthe Kollwitz to Maria Lai at the Venice Biennale in 2017.
BROT is talked about – over 500 proverbs deal with BREAD.
The photographers of the photo studio on the Beautiful Mountain approach the subject from a variety of directions. BREAD is viewed, observed, described and edited. The result are photographic sculptures, associative image and text compositions, intertwining of BREAD with literature and poetry, stagings and installations, street photography, still lifes and everyday observations. Sometimes the camera seeks proximity to the subject, sometimes it is an observer from a distance.
There are endless stories about BREAD – we tell eleven of them.
participating artist:
Anneliese Fechner, Cornelia Ogiolda, Edith maria Balk, Erhard Flach, Frauke Langguth, Gabriele Kuhlewind, Sibylle Hoffmann, Thilo Seibt, Thomas Tillmann, Winfried Mateyka, Wolfgang Eschenborn
Poetry like bread?
This bread should grind between your teeth
and reawaken the hunger before it is satisfied
And this poetry will have to be sharp of knowledge and bitter of longing to be able to touch the sleep of men.
from Ingeborg Bachmann’s Poetics Lecture (1959/60)
In the first of five lectures at Frankfurt University on the questions of contemporary poetry, Ingeborg Bachmann dealt with the “questions and illusory questions” in the winter semester 1959/60. In it she postulated the following. “Only the greatest seriousness and the fight against the misuse of original great sad experiences can help us to awaken it (the people) from its fantastic lethargy. The people need poetry like the bread’, Simone Weil once wrote down this touching sentence, a wishful phrase, perhaps. But people today need cinema and illusions like whipped cream, and the more demanding people (and that includes us) need a little shock, a little Ionesco and beatnik howling, so as not to lose their appetite for everything. Poetry like bread? This bread should grind its teeth and reawaken hunger before it satisfies it. And this poetry (I also add theology) will have to be sharp of knowledge and bitter of desire to touch the sleep of men. For we are asleep, sleepers, for fear of having to perceive ourselves and our world.
The work of Thilo Seibt tries to translate these thoughts into images.