Kai Wiedenhöfer

In 1989 Kai Wiedenhöfer photographed the fall of the Berlin Wall in his hometown. He was deeply moved by this experience of history unfolding, and at the time, like many, he believed this event would mark the end of walls being employed as political tools and dismissed them as anachronistic instruments of division. Over 20 years later, history has proved us wrong; indeed, walls have enjoyed a barbaric renaissance. Border barriers have been erected in the US, Europe and the Middle East in the aftermath of political, economic, religious and ethnic conflicts. Wiedenhöfer has documented walls in Belfast, Ceuta and Melilla, Baghdad, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the American- Mexican border, Cyprus, Korea as well as the remains of the Iron Curtain. Confrontier presents Wiedenhöfer's project and expresses his conviction that walls are not solutions to today's political and economic problems, but proof of human weakness, error and our failure to communicate with one another.

For more than 20 years Kai Wiedenhöfer has been taking photographs in the Middle East, a place where many journalists and photographers have covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet Wiedenhöfer is unique in that he concentrates exclusively on Gaza, and often remains there to take photos long after the media has moved onto more 'pressing' news stories. Even in 2009 after the offensive of the Israeli army, Wiedenhöfer remained in Gaza. During this time he took disturbingly quiet, almost repetitive pictures of the bleak aftermath of the war that form The Book of Destruction. Wiedenhöfer´s images of crumbling ruins and maimed civilians are a powerful landscape of disquiet and destruction.