Wim Wenders: Nearby and Far Away

Galerie Bastian in Berlin-Dahlem is showing new photographs by photographer and film director Wim Wenders as part of the Gallery Weekend.

– China I, 2019, 2025

Wim Wenders' international fame began early. His films “Paris Texas” and “The American Friend” became icons of cinematography, in which the director invented a new kind of storytelling, the slow metaphorical language that resembles the creation of a poem.

His most recent film “Perfect Days” is another architecture of storytelling, in which time and space, the protagonist and the light in nature find the pull of a bright context from an everyday life, as if life always begins late. But we also see his significant photographic work, created during the years of preparing his films in the most diverse places in the world, as imaginary narratives in which we discover how a moment in a landscape, in a space, is perceived. Everything stands still in this devoted study of moods. But the question of why this moment was significant remains a mystery.

Wim Wenders' new photographs, the first part of which were taken during a stay in the landscapes of China, show us spaces with great horizons, landscapes whose pictorial space reaches out and yet appears present, in which the visitors appear like a humming silence and quickly disappear again into the distance. The people in these pictures resemble the traces of a passing inscription.

The images of China's big cities are dominated by shapes, colors and passers-by in urban life, paused at the moment they are viewed, as in any photograph. And yet the conversation of things will change in the next moment and we too will be another. A second part of the exhibition is devoted to the images from China, seemingly hardly any further away.

And yet in the snapshots from the forest we encounter the same echo of silence, the forest that for centuries connected the earth with the sky. Wim Wenders sees the magical light phenomena from the deep middle of summer, the romantic forest that was once the untouchable cathedral of longing for the Germans, in which the young Goethe wrote the dreamy “Wanderers' Night Song” in 1780.

Opening hours: Thursday to Saturday from 11 am to 5 pm

Runtime: Sat, 03/05/2025 to Sat, 26/07/2025

Takes place here:

• Galerie Bastian