Marta Astfalck-Vietz & Monira Al Qadiri

In the space of a single decade, the so-called "Golden Twenties", photographer Marta Astfalck-Vietz (1901–1994) created a glittering corpus of portrait, nude and dance photography and conceptual series. Idiosyncratic enactments reveal her interest in self-invention. For these she not only took the pictures, but also arranged the setting, directed and posed. Astfalck-Vietz slips here into a range of characters, challenges female stereotypes, alludes critically to social transformations of the period and in so doing anticipates visual strategies of the 1970s.

Playing with fabric and texture, Marta Astfalck-Vietz generates an almost haptic quality in her work. The innovative images composed under shared copyright with photographer Heinz Hajek-Halke (1898–1983) achieve dreamy, often surreal effects by experimenting with techniques like distortion, double exposure and shadow play.

This substantial solo exhibition with accompanying catalogue (German/English) features about 130 works to celebrate the bold and multi-faceted œuvre of Marta Astfalck-Vietz. Her estate, held by the Berlinische Galerie since 1991, was digitised and in part restored in 2022/2023 under a programme established by the Land of Berlin for the digitisation of cultural assets.

In her work, Monira Al Qadiri focuses on the sociocultural impacts of the oil industry as well as its past and future. She has been researching and working on this topic for more than ten years and has shaped the discourse around oil, patriarchy, and globalization. Her works reflect on the connections between the establishment of oil as the leading fossil fuel in the middle of the twentieth century and the expansion of consumer capitalism in the post-war period. She often bases her art on autobiographical experiences, including life in Kuwait in the 1980s and 1990s, and critically examines prevailing historical and political narratives.  Addressing the issue of oil invariably involves addressing the history of human interaction with the earth, both its exploitation and its resistance. For the Berlinische Galerie, Al Qadiri is developing a site-specific installation – consisting of a large-format mural, objects, and sound – in which oil is far more than just a ‘resource’. It also symbolizes the violence, memories, and individual stories linked to its extraction.