The study of death, time and transitoriness is one of the oldest and most essential themes in philosophy, religion and art. The »Necropolis Project« focuses on visual forms of memory of war, death, destruction, loss, time and decay. Symbols, ciphers, allegories and the human face are examined in terms of architectural history, cultural science and art theory with photographs and visual-media experiments - a phenomenological invitation to look, to read and understand pictures, to reflect and to contemplate.

The »pictures« are on the streets, squares and bridges of Berlin, at memorial sites, in cemeteries, in parks. They are part of our everyday lives, yet they have to be discovered and translated as cultural historical narratives. Symbols and allegories, however, do not necessarily depict reality but also representations from a spatiotemporal world of ideas. When we look for these images and assemble them as a visual collection, we find ourselves in a field of tension between seeing and perceiving, impression, experience and memory, sense and meaning. Further parameters are the questions to the degree of reality, of authenticity, of perspective, of pathos and aesthetics.

With texts (Deutsch, English) by Markus Meckel, Mara Pinardi, Zvi Hecker, Tim van Beveren, Merle Lampe, Hala Hamed Alawi, Susanne Junker et al.; 467 photographs and graphics