Sacred Sister
"First and foremost, my photography installations are visual poems," Bettina WitteVeen starts. "The second thing is their meaning and how viewers see them. We are so inundated with imagery today, and we're not looking at the meaning behind it."
Her exhibition, "Brueder, Zur Sonne, Zur Freiheit (Brothers, to the Sun, to Freedom!) and the beat goes on," an installation of her ongoing worldwide project, The Heart of Darkness, is on display at the Goethe-Institut.
The 22 photos comment on world history, chaos, genocide and terrorism, ranging historically from the Free Soil Movement in Kansas and the American Civil War in the 1800s, to Nazi book burning ceremonies and America's Great Depression in the 1930s, to modern political movements in East Germany, Cambodia, South Africa, China and America.
"I look at how youthful idealism, which is a very positive thing, is used to create war like the Red Guard and the Khmer Rouge," she comments. "We used to think as an economy that we couldn't exist without slavery. We were wrong. I think today we think that war is a natural state of affairs. It is not. I strongly contend that war is a form of virus like a disease. If we can identify different components of this disease, and as a collective act on these components, I think we will be able to achieve peace."
Drawing parallels between Germany's Geniezeit writers in the 1800s and American Beat Generation writers of the 1950s, she examines censorship, youth's search for self-identity and the nature of spiritual beauty.
WitteVeen engages her viewers' ability to draw connections between portraiture and documentary photography, as well as literary and political movements, throughout human history. An image of a hobo jumping on a train during the Great Depression, when juxtaposed to a portrait of Beat writer Jack Kerouac, for example, becomes a sign of freedom.
"You come to the photography with one assumption," she points out. "However, when you look closer at the photograph, you realize that this was a man desperate to find a job during the Great Depression.
"I've been traveling for ten years to sites of conflict. I've been to Micronesia and both world wars. I went to the Congo last year. I'd photograph from the perspective of a soldier running up a hill. Or I'd put the camera in the trenches where a rifle would have been. You see what the soldiers would have seen and you see what we see today," she says.
Through her exhibitions, WitteVeen hopes to facilitate a better cultural dialogue between Germans and Americans, both of whom are relatively ignorant of the other's political history.
"The idea is to show people that we have a very common history," she explains. "The history belongs to all of us. It's a human history."