Photo Basel/Berlin is excited to be back in real life. After the fair in Basel (this past June) was cancelled due to the pandemic, Photo Basel launched the photography world’s first-ever virtual fair. Despite the success of over 20’000 unique visitors on the fair’s website – nothing will ever replace a physical fair.

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In order to celebrate photography in real life again – Photo Basel is honoured to join POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair from September 10th – 13. The fairs (which combined boast far over 100 international exhibitors), will be located at acclaimed Tempelhof Flughafen Berlin and run parallel to the renowned Berlin Art Week, the Gallery Weekend Berlin and the Berlin Biennale.

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Photo Basel/Berlin’s inaugural edition awaits over 20 international galleries, exhibiting more than 50 artists (and over 200 photographic positions) – some highlights will be: Edward Burtynsky, Boris Mikhailov, Sebastian Riemer, Roger Ballen, Werner Bischof, René Groebli, Sophie Gabrielle, Sascha Weidner, Ayana V. Jackson, Radenko Milak and Roman Uranjek, Lin Zhipeng, Susa Templin, Andreas Walther, Douglas Mandry and Beat Presser.

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Exhibitor list:

Galerie & CO119 - Paris, France / Artco Galerie – Aachen, Berlin, Cape Town / Bildhalle - Zürich, Switzerland & Amsterdam, The Netherlands /  Baudoin Lebon gallery - Paris, France / BLOW UP PRESS - Warsaw, Poland / Chrysalid Gallery - Rotterdam, The Netherlands / Dix9 - Hélène Lacharmoise - Paris, France / DOROTHÉE NILSSON GALLERY - Berlin, Germany / FABIAN & CLAUDE WALTER GALERIE - Zürich, Switzerland / Galerie 94 - Baden, Switzerland / GOWEN CONTEMPORARY - Geneva, Switzerland / Galerija Fotografija - Ljubjana, Slovenia / ISSP Gallery - Riga, Latvia / Katharina Maria Raab – Berlin, Germany / Galerie Koschmieder - Berlin, Germany / Migrant Bird Space – Berlin, Germany / Mironova Gallery – Kyiv, Ukraine / Galerie–Peter–Sillem - Frankfurt, Germany / Photon Galerija - Ljubljana, Slovenia & Vienna, Austria / Per van der Horst Gallery - Taipei City, Taiwan

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Bildhalle | Werner Bischof

Werner Bischof was born in Switzerland 1916. He studied photography with Hans Finsler in his native Zurich at the School for Arts and Crafts, then opened a photography and advertising studio. In 1942 he became a freelancer for Du magazine, which published his first major photo essays in 1943. Bischof received international recognition after the publication of his 1945 reportage on the devastation caused by the Second World War.

In the years that followed, Bischof traveled in Italy and Greece for Swiss Relief, an organization dedicated to post-war reconstruction. In 1948 he photographed the Winter Olympics in St Moritz for Life magazine. After trips to Eastern Europe, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, he worked for Picture Post, The Observer, Illustrated and Epoca. He was the first photographer to join Magnum with the founding members in 1949.

Disliking the `superficiality and sensationalism` of the magazine business, he devoted much of his working life to looking for order and tranquility in traditional culture, something that did not endear him to picture editors looking for hot topical material. Nonetheless, he found himself sent to report on famine in India by Life magazine (1951), and he went on to work in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Indochina. The images from these reportages were used in major picture magazines throughout the world.

In the autumn of 1953 Bischof created a series of expansively composed color photographs of the USA. The following year he traveled through Mexico and Panama, and then on to a remote part of Peru, where he was engaged in making a film. Tragically, Bischof died in a road accident in the Andes on 16 May 1954, only nine days before Magnum founder Robert Capa lost his life in Indochina.

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Photon Gallery | Vanja Bučan

Vanja Bučan is an internationally renowned Slovenian photographer, who lives and works in Berlin. She graduated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague at the department of documentary photography, however, she distanced herself from the documentary genre during her studies and focused on staged photography instead. Before becoming a professional photographer, she studied sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana, and actively took part in environmental activism, which is evident conceptually in her artistic oeuvre. She views photography as an open medium, a realm where she can freely express her views and critique of society. A professional role worth mentioning is her position as the official photographer at the Maribor European Capital of Culture 2012 for the collective Urbane Brazde before she relocated to Berlin. In her signature artistic style, she alters her own photographs and places them in staged compositions in order to achieve deconstructed and multifaceted realities that generate a visually rich expression, which verges on fiction.

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Her work has been exhibited at several major international group exhibitions, such as Month of Photography Los Angeles, Official MOPLA Group Show (2018); Camouflage, City Oases, NORDICO City Museum in Linz (2018); Visions of Nature, Kunst Haus Wien, Museum Hundertwasser in Vienna (2017); official exhibition of the Renaissance Photography Prize, Getty Images Gallery in London (2016). She likewise participated at various biennials and festivals around the world: Directors Choice Series’ Circulation(s), Photo Zurich, Switzerland (2019); Vento Solar, Solar Photo Festival, Fortaleza, Brazil (2018); Loba 2018, Photolux Festival, Lucca, Italy (2018); Athens Photo Festival, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (2018); 3rd Beijing Photo Biennial: Confusing Public and Private, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China (2018). Her works have been nominated for the Prix Pictet and Leica Oskar Barnack Award, and she received two prestigious awards for her series Sequences of Truth and Deception: Lens Culture Exposure Award (2015) and Renaissance Photography Prize (2016).

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Galerie & CO119 | Sophie Gabrielle

Sophie Gabrielle is an Australian photographer and curator originally from Canberra and now based in Melbourne. After graduating from Melbourne’s Photography Studies College in 2015, she was a Lensculture Art Awards finalist in 2018, then Foam Talent winner in 2019. We have chosen to exhibit not only her best-known series, Worry For the Fruits the Birds Won’t Eat (with which she won Foam Talent), but also to explore the themes which link that series to her other two major projects, WIP: Weeping Rock and BL_NK SP_CE. What emerges is evidence of a common approach to narrative image, plunging the viewer into a universe which is at the same time nostalgic, mystical and dark – almost as if entering into a tale told by the brothers Grimm.

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‍ARTCO Berlin gallery | Roger Ballen - Roger the Rat
Throughout his career, Roger Ballen has pursued a singular artistic goal: to give expression to the human psyche—to explore visually, the hidden forces that shape who we are. In 60 black and white photographs a persona, Roger the Rat is created by Ballen, that is fundamentally archetypal even mythological, a half human, half animal character that has the capability to profoundly lodge itself in the mind of those viewing these images.  

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I cannot remember when I put this rat mask on for the first time…I am unsure whether I am a rat or human.  Perhaps my mother was a rat and my father a human. I think I am a bit of each…
- Roger Ballen

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In this exhibition, Roger Ballen unveils a selection of uncanny photographs so completely different from his previous work, yet still with the unmistakable Ballenesque aesthetic. In true style to Roger Ballen, the photographs reveal a range of emotions from the comic to the tragic at the same time making a profound statement about the human condition.Produced in Johannesburg South Africa over a five-year period from 2015 to 2020, Ballen creates and documents a quasi-person who lives an isolated life outside the mainstream of society surrounding himself with rats and mannequins that he collects from various locations. 
Friendless and deranged, Roger the Rat constructs a fantasy world with many of the lifeless
figures communicating with them as if they were alive.  

In many of the photographs we can view the impressive creations of Roger the Rat sometimes figures dressed in complete likeness to himself and at other times with objects, animals, and drawings in a Ballenesque style that express black humour, a theatre of the absurd.At the same time as the first exhibition of the Roger the Rat series, Hatje Cantz publishes a book of the same title.A film about this theme will also be presented during this Exhibition.

Roger Ballen (born 1950 in New York City) and living in South Africa since 1982 is one of the most important and original art photographers working today. He is best known for his probing, often challenging images that exist in a space between painting, drawing, installation, and photography that is commonly referred to a Ballenesque.  His photographs and films have been shown and collected by some of the most important museums and his many books have contributed to the field of art and photography.   

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More information: www.photo-basel.com/berlin

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