Zerheilt

New home: Jewish life in Berlin of the Twenty-First Century

Following more than forty years of photographic storytelling of Jewish life around the world, Frédéric Brenner spent three years exploring Berlin -- a stage for a vast spectrum of expressions and performances of Judaism. In his new photographic essay he portrays individuals -- newcomers, old timers, converts, immigrants and others – who have made Berlin their home or are just passing through. Via a series of fragmentary insights into this incubator of paradox and dissonance, he reflects on conflicting narratives of redemption and gives light to an ever so present absence. Like a shattered mirror, these images offer a polyphonic, sometimes bizarre and disturbing reflection of and on a topography of displacement and estrangement in contemporary human condition, far beyond the story of Berlin or of Jews.