Vaterliebe

In her autobiographical work, photographer Nina Hansch engages with the death of her father and with grief. Her approach is multilayered. The loss is reflected in the intimate bond between father and daughter, almost like a symbiosis of similar gestures and facial expressions carried across generations. Self-portraits by Nina Hansch are juxtaposed with fashion photographs. A feeling of inner coldness and meaninglessness in everyday situations becomes visible. Nina Hansch travels to the places where she once was with her father and family, but this time alone. The photographs face one another, making visible that death, as an inheritance, also means the loss of the remaining family. Other family members do not appear. The sea surrounds the series, carrying the viewer and offering calm between the father-daughter images, which hang together on a wall in the exhibition. The exhibition presents archival images, portraits, landscape photographs, atmospheric images, and object photographs. Two long pieces of wood hang in the exhibition, remnants of her father's tree of life. Nina Hansch, known for her humanistic photography, is distinguished by her closeness to the people she portrays. In Vaterliebe, Nina Hansch moves close to herself and to her own foundation. The work invites viewers to find their own ways of dealing with grief: to speak about it, or to live out their grief within the exhibition and leave it there.