The Michael Horbach Foundation's art spaces in Cologne will open on February 3, 2017. Photo exhibition „Bare Life – Flight and Expulsion in the 21st Century“ by the two documentary photographers Christoph Püschner and Frank Schultze.
The photojournalists Christoph Püschner and Frank Schultze, shaped by around 20 years of documentary photography, have selected 29 of their images for the exhibition. Whether it's refugees fleeing terrorist militias, as in northern Iraq, or climate refugees fleeing drought disasters, as in Somalia, whether they are stateless, displaced, or homeless: in the images of the two photographers, we are always confronted with defenseless lives in the hope of refuge or the right to stay.
Flight and expulsion occur almost entirely unnoticed by the global public, for example in Ukraine or Syria: As in eastern Congo in June 2006, where refugees spent days and nights in the bush for fear of raids by militias before they arrived exhausted at Aveba camp. Or in Bangladesh, where climate refugees sought refuge from flooding in huts covered with plastic tarps at a camp near Shyamnagar. The list of places could go on: Grozny in Chechnya, Zugdidi in Georgia, Kitgum in Uganda.
Christoph Püschner and Frank Schultze continue to tell these stories – in their pictures, each of which also has its own story. These are not the loud, headline-grabbing stories, but rather silent testaments to the daily suffering in the world's crisis hotspots. They are also images of a story that has long since arrived in the middle of Europe, in the middle of Germany, as the most recent exhibition pictures of refugees in Karlsruhe, Dortmund, and Simmerath prove.
Christoph Püschner,
Born in 1958. After training as a retail salesman, studied photojournalism at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld. Since 1989, Christoph Püschner has worked in the countries of the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East for German news magazines and aid organizations. Since the summer of 1999, Christoph Püschner has been a member of the Zeitenspiegel reportage agency.
Frank Schultze,
Born in 1959, he hails from Daun/Eifel and studied photojournalism in Dortmund. Since graduating in 1992, he has worked for all major German-language and international magazines and newspapers such as GEO, Stern, Spiegel, Chrismon, Times, Focus, Natur, Das Magazin, NZZ, and Die Zeit. Since May 2000, Frank Schultze has been a member of the Zeitenspiegel reporting agency.
(Source: MHS Press Release)