Memories of a place I have never been...

Memories of a place I have never been, Bastian Gehbauer by HOTO Berlin
Eröffnung: 2.6.2023, 18–21Uhr

Bastian Gehbauer’s series Phantasma (2022) is an archival work evolved from photographs of the estate of Berlin-based modernist architect Harry Rosenthal.

The photographs are of a studio house, built for the literary figure Arnold Zweig and completed in 1931, a building that no longer exists.

A Nazi general named Kaupisch, had the entire structure transformed in 1938 to eliminate the Jewish modernist “eyesore,” as he called it. By that time, the architect and owner of the building had already fled Germany because of their Jewish ancestry.
For Bastian Gehbauer, Rosenthal’s negatives went from being a contemporary document to a portal, an entrance into an extinct place, a bygone era. Similar to a door, he cut portrait formats out of the landscape-format negatives, directing the gaze to what seemed essential to him. He made a picture within a picture.