The Museum of Contemporary Art of Republic of Srpska is organizing the Helga Paris: Photograph exhibition in collaboration with Goethe Institute in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations of the Federal Republic of Germany (ifa: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), which will be open on September 6th and will last until September 26.
The MSURS show will be the fourth consecutive exhibition of art photographs by the great German artist on her tour of South-East Europe, staged in celebration of the European Heritage Days.
Helga Paris is a distinguished German photographer, well-known for her photo testimonies showing everyday life in East Germany.
Born in 1938, she has had more than 20 solo and dozens of collaborative exhibitions over her long career, and she holds a prominent place in the history of German photography.
Paris, who has been a resident of Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg since 1966, chronicled the aftermath of WWII in East Germany for more than 30 years, exploring and recording in her photographs East Berlin’s melancholy vitality and poetics.
“The work of Helga Paris (1938) occupies a special place in German photography. Her series of photographs revealed for decades the changing image of German history, spanning over 30 years. Helga Paris casts the same steady penetrating and gentle look as she reports on the life of a country that came into being in 1949 as a result of the the Second World War, a country of workers and peasants that exhisted east of the Cold War front until 1989.” (From Inka Schube’s foreword to the Helga Paris: Photographs exhibition catalogue)
Helga Paris is drawn to everyday moments, those of the banality of solitude and togetherness: holding, gazes, gestures, movements, surface structure and rooms, which inform on both the circumstances, histories, and experiences of people and things, and the manner of treatment of those circumstances. Thanks to her special ability to photograph both untended streets and derelict houses on the one hand, and pub visitors and children playing on the other, with the same kind of empathy and gentle strictness, Paris bestows a special kind of dignity on both people and things.
To date, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska has successfully hosted a number of events organised jointly with the Goethe Institute in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Institute of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany (ifa), of which the 2015 exhibition by the established German artist Sigmar Polke is particularly worth mentioning.
Helga Paris biography
1938 Born in Gollnow (Poland)
1945–1956 Spends childhood and youth in Zossen (Germany)
1956–1960 Moves to Berlin to study fashion design
1967 Takes up photography
1975 Joins the National Association of Visual Artists (VBK), as one of the first self-taught women photographers
1980s Creates her major series of photographs, such as Berlin Youth, Self-Portraits, Houses and Faces. Halle 1983-85, and Treffmodelle.
1987 The district branch of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) bans the exhibition Houses and Faces. Halle 1983-85
1996 Elected member of the Berlin Academy of Arts
2004 Wins the Hannah-Höch Prize
Helga Paris lives and works in Berlin.