WALLONWALL by Kai Wiedenhöfer (Archive)

Kai Wiedenhöfer is raising funds for WALLONWALL, a photo exhibition on the Berlin Wall. To receive contributions, the project must be funded in full by 7/2/13. To help: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/7...

From Kai: I'm a photographer based in Berlin and for the past seven years I have been photographing walls that separate people around the world.

I'm now in the process of publishing a book of the pictures from this long term project (titled 'Confrontier'), and my dream is to realize an exhibition of these photographs on one of the most dramatic landmarks of the city I live in: the Berlin Wall.

The concept of the WALLONWALL exhibition is to show the contemporary issues of separation walls erected all over the world on the physical remains of the most famous fallen wall. Peace begins where walls fall, not where they are erected.

If we reach our target, we will be printing 36 pictures from the project in extra large format (9x3 meters - i.e. 29x10 feet), and we'll be mounting them on one side of one of the longest stretches of the Wall still standing along the river Spree in Berlin.

The exhibition will cover more than 1100 square meters and will create a striking visual experience for the visitors that come to see the Wall every day.

The exhibition will be open for two months, in July and August 2013, and will be open for free to everybody 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is expected that more than 200.000 people will visit that stretch of the Berlin Wall in the central months of the summer.

Our target amount will cover our expenses for the materials, the printing and the mounting of the pictures.

Since you are probably wondering: we have already all the necessary permits from the relevant authorities in Berlin for the mounting of the pictures on the side of the Wall facing the river Spree. The mounting will be executed by professionals that will ensure the best result.

We also have already realized a successful test last November: a test print was mounted and removed after 20 days with no remains on the wall.

Since 2006 I've photographed eight border and separation walls:
Baghdad (700 km)
South-Korea | North-Korea (248 km)
Cyprus | Greenline (180 km)
USA | Mexico (3141 km)
Ceuta and Melilla, Spain | Marocco (8+13 km)
Israel | Palestinian Territories (703 km)
Belfast | Peace Lines (15 km)
The Iron Curtain | former German - German border (1378 km)

You could find more informations on the project website: http://wallonwall.org

Kai Wiedenhöfer, born in Germany in 1966, received an MA in photography and editorial design from the Folkwang School in Essen and studied Arabic in Damascus, Syria. Since 1989 the focus of his work has mainly been the Middle East. He has received numerous awards, as the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Alexia Grant for World Peace and Cultural Understanding, World Press Photo Awards, the Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography and lately the Carmignac Gestion Photojournalism Award. He has published three books with Steidl "Perfect Peace" (2002) , "Wall" (2007) and "The Book of Destruction" (2010) which was exhibited as a solo exhibition in the Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Neil Burgess is an agent and editor who has worked with top photographers worldwide for 30 years. The director of Magnum Photos London and New York, he started nbpictures in London in 2003 combining interests in art commerce and journalism, and representing Sebastiao Salgado and Annie Leibovitz.