photo: Ulrich Seidl, from the series Paradise Love (2012)
Next to the retrospective Post Scriptum by Christer Strömholm, C|O Berlin also recently opened another, smaller exhibition by director Ulrich Seidl. On Febuary 10th 2013 at 16h the exhibition will be accompanied by a special performance where Seidl interviews four protagonists from his film trilogy Paradise. Check out a preview of the exhibition after the jump.
For the exhibition Love Faith Hope Ulrich Seidl selected pictures from three movies he directed: Paradise: Love, Paradise: Faith and Paradise: Hope. Even though all movies are called “paradise”, they show the exact opposite – life as hell. In fact, all of them deal with people that are desperately looking for paradise – and who fail by doing so. The exhibition starts with pictures from the movie Paradise: Love. It is about fat older Austrian women that to go on sex holidays to Kenya, exploiting younger African men. Quite depressing, as you can imagine.
photo: Ulrich Seidl, from the series Paradise Faith (2012)
The second part features pictures from the movie Paradise: Faith. Here, Seidl shows the horrible marriage of a lonely religious fanatic. Just as cheerful as the first part!
photo: Ulrich Seidl, from the series Paradise Hope (2012)
The last part consists of stills from the movie Paradise Hope, which will premiere at this year’s Berlin Biennale. It is about a 13 year old girl who is being sent to fat camp. Here she falls in love with a doctor. And guess what? Their love fails.
Even though the pictures are quite powerful, shocking and brutal, they are somehow also mundane and shallow. At one glance, you understand their intention and “message”. Afterwards there is nothing else to discover. There is no magic, no mystery about them. Probably the reason for that is that these pictures have been taken from movies, where they are part of a story. So maybe transforming these pictures into photographs just did not work out…
