2026 Review

Laura Krauss’s Berlin’s Wound is far more than a photographic chronicle of the former Berlin Wall. It is about walking, observing, reminiscing, and contemplating what happens to a wound after the barrier vanishes. Thirty-five years after the Wall’s demise, Krauss traveled 100 miles along the Berlin Wall, the former border.

 The exhibition does not give a definitive answer; it instead asks many questions that may lead the viewer to question aspects of the world around them. 

 Krauss’s black-and-white photographs highlight what remains, what has been lost, what was ignored, and what was transformed. Some images show unmistakable traces of the Wall, while others blend seamlessly into ordinary streets, fields, trees, waterways, and neighborhoods. This juxtaposition is unsettling. An artifact that once symbolized division, surveillance, confinement, and peril now appears unremarkable, yet still influencing through its absence and presence. 

 The exhibition’s central visual language is the tension between presence and absence.

 The medium of analog black-and-white photography is particularly effective. Stripped of color and time, the images occupy an ambiguous space between historical documentation and present-day observation.

 Krauss presents Berlin as a portrait of juxtapositions: captivity and freedom, memory and oblivion, human construction and natural reclamation, architecture and vegetation, historical landmarks and areas where history seems to have faded. 

 The exhibition’s color photographs introduce an additional dimension: graffiti, moss, winter skies, and remnants of the Wall blur the line between historical evidence and contemporary expression, suggesting impermanence.

 The physical experience of walking through Berlin’s former border is profoundly appropriate. Krauss’s journey itself became an integral part of the artistic process, transforming the border into a space for contemplation not unlike her journey on the Santiago de Compostela. 

 Berlin’s Wound ultimately analyzes how history permeates physical space rather than elucidating Berlin’s historical narrative.

 The exhibition does not answer whether Berlin’s wound has healed and instead offers a space for contemplation and acknowledgement that scars can become integral to remembrance.

 Timothy Dahlum