17 April 2024

Poesie der Zeit. Michael Ruetz – Timescapes 1966–2023
Exhibition, 9 May – 4 August 2024

Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin

Invitation to press talk and press preview
Wednesday, 8 May 2024, 11 am
Exhibition halls open at 10 am

With
Michael Ruetz, photographic artist, member of the Film and Media Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste
Werner Heegewaldt,Director of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste
Franziska Schmidt, exhibition curator
Astrid Köppe, visual artist and Michael Ruetz’s project manager

For accreditation, please send an email to presse@adk.de

How can time and impermanence be rendered visible, and how can the upheavals and changes taking place in a society or an urban space be documented? Few other artists have concerned themselves with these questions to the extent that Michael Ruetz has. In the mid-1960s, he embarked on the large-scale photographic study Timescapes to observe the transformation of natural and urban environments.
The exhibition at the Pariser Platz centres on the Berlin Timescapes. His photo sequences present a particularly powerful consolidation of the far-reaching transformation of German society in the post-war period, after reunification and up to the present day. Loci of power or historical relevance, such as Potsdamer Platz, the Brandenburg Gate, Schlossplatz, Gendarmenmarkt, the government quarters and the Berlin Wall have undergone rapid transformation since 1989/90. Ruetz’ images of Berlin are an expression of how architecture can shape and redefine our environment, thus giving it a prerogative of interpretation over our perception. His Timescapes develop their own aesthetics beyond documentary sobriety, revealing a poetry of time in the process.
Michael Ruetz is one of Germany’s best-known photographic artists. His photographs of the APO extra-parliamentary opposition have now entered the collective visual memory, along with journalistic photos from the time of the Greek military dictatorship and the Carnation Revolution in Portugal.

Press images are available for download here.

Press contact on behalf of the Akademie der Künste
Hendrik von Boxberg, 0177 7379207, presse@von-boxberg.de