Wiedenhöfer: Confrontier

In 1989, Kai Wiedenhöfer photographed the fall of the Berlin Wall in his hometown, and was deeply moved by this experience of history unfolding. At the time, Wiedenhöfer, like many, believed this event would mark the end of walls being employed as political tools and dismissed them as anachronistic instruments of division. Over twenty years later, history has proved us wrong; indeed, walls have enjoyed a barbaric renaissance. Border barriers have been erected in the US, Europe, and the Middle East in the aftermath of political, economic, religious and ethnic conflicts. Wiedenhöfer has documented walls in Belfast, Ceuta and Melilla, Baghdad, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the American- Mexican border, Cyprus, Korea as well as the remains of the Iron Curtain. Confrontier presents Wiedenhöfer’s comprehensive project and evidences his conviction that walls are not solutions to today’s political and economic problems, but proof of human weakness, error and our inability to communicate with one another. Kai Wiedenhöfer, born in Schwenningen, Germany, in 1966, received a Master’s in photography and editorial design from the Folkwang School in Essen and studied Arabic in Damascus, Syria. Since 1989 the focus of his work has been the Middle East. Wiedenhöfer has received numerous awards including the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Alexia Foundation For World Peace Grant, World Press Photo Awards, the Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography and the Carmignac Gestion Photojournalism Award. Steidl has published Wiedenhöfer’s Perfect Peace (2002), Wall (2007) and The Book of Destruction (2010), the photos of which comprised a solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.