C/O Berlin

Wim Wenders

Instant Stories

07 Jul - 23 Sep 2018

© David von Becker
WIM WENDERS
Instant Stories
7 July - 23 September 18

Summer 1973. Toast, ham and eggs, ketchup, drip coffee: scenes from an American diner. The subject matter is trivial, but the occasion was momentous: it was the first day of filming for Wenders’ road movie Alice in the Cities (1974). In the film, the main character wanders the streets of American cities with an instant camera, the Polaroid SX-70. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Polaroids were Wim Wenders’ visual notebook, a field of experimentation, and a photographic road movie. The resulting collection of pictures includes thousands of unique, personal shots of his film sets and travels through Europe, the United States, and many other places around the globe. They show Wenders in his personal surroundings and portraits of celebrities and friends including Annie Leibovitz, Robby Müller, Dennis Hopper, and Peter Handke. The exhibition Wim Wenders . Instant Stories, presenting a selection of approximately 240 Polaroids by the award-winning director, filmmaker, and artist Wim Wenders, will be making its first and only stop in Germany at C/O Berlin. Along with Wenders’ photographs, the exhibition includes excerpts from films in which Wenders used the medium of instant photography as part of the film narrative. The exhibition is presented in cooperation with the Wim Wenders Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery in London. The Berlin show was curated by Felix Hoffmann and Anna Duque y González. A catalog accompanying the exhibition is published by Schirmer/Mosel, Munich. Yorck Kinogruppe will be organizing a Wim Wenders film program at delphi LUX.

Wim Wenders is considered a pioneer of New German Cinema and one of the most important representatives of contemporary German film. He is a director, producer, photographer, and writer. In addition to multiple award-winning feature films including Alice in the Cities (1973), The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas (1984), Wings of Desire (1987), and The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), his most recent documentary films, Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Pina (2011), and The Salt of the Earth (2014) were nominated for the Academy Awards. The documentary film Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (2018) recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. His new feature film Grenzenlos (Submergence) will be having its international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival TIFF on September 10, 2018.

Wenders’ photographic works have been shown in numerous museums worldwide including Centre Pompidou in Paris, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. In the fall of 2012, Wim Wenders and his wife Donata Wenders established the Wim Wenders Foundation in Düsseldorf. The non-profit foundation brings together Wim Wenders’ cinematic, photographic, artistic, and literary oeuvre, preserving and restoring the works and making them permanently accessible to the general public. The Wim Wenders Foundation also supports young talents in the area of innovative cinematic narration. Wim Wenders lives and works in Berlin.
 

Tags: Dennis Hopper, Annie Leibovitz, Wim Wenders, Donata Wenders