Daiter Contemporary is excited to present the first comprehensive exhibition of John Gossage’s Berlin in the Time of the Wall. Beginning in 1982 Gossage made many trips to Berlin throughout the ‘80s and into the early ‘90s. What began as a trip to exhibit photographs and conduct a workshop at the Werkstatt für Fotografie in Kreuzburg became a point of discovery that would forever change Gossage’s work. In Berlin Gossage found a subject that would change his sense of order and ideas about politicized landscapes.
Berlin during the period that Gossage photographed it and even today is a place where everything, literally everything from buildings to vacant land, evokes history as well as the present. Not only was life there defined by its connection to the past, it was defined by the constant physical presence and the emotional reality of Die Mauer. The Wall was everywhere; it divided lives and constricted movement, but more important it marked the place and places where history subsumed the present. Into these places stepped John Gossage, an American outsider, who looked at Berlin and confronted the Wall in a way that those who lived with it, would or could not.
Berlin in the Time of the Wall is a comprehensive undertaking. Originally conceived by Gossage as a history project, he has created a survey that is both historical and contemporary. Berlin in the Time of the Wall is a story told in images that are as much metaphorical and emotive as they are politically accurate and historically mindful.
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of Berlin in the Time of the Wall, a 364 page clothbound publication by Loosestrife editions with text by Gerry Badger.
Daiter Contemporary has released a 72 page excerpt of the publication which is available at the gallery.