PAULA MARKERT

“DEUTSCHLAND, WARUM BIST DU SO?”

In her lecture “Germany, Why Are You Like This?”, photographer Paula Markert provides an overview of her career and the conceptual strategies of her artistic documentary practice, which she understands as a form of self-inquiry and active participation in social and political discourse.

Starting with her project “The Conditions”, in which she examines questions of identity and social conditioning within a microcosm through staged portrayals of individual family histories, she goes on to present later projects that expand this intimate context and view the individual as part of the broader social and political frameworks in which they are embedded.

In particular the long-term project “A Journey Through Germany: The NSU Murder Series”, published as a book in 2019 by Hartmann Books, Markert interrogates a country in which social structures and state failure enabled a series of right-wing terrorist murders and attacks. In her most recent work, she weaves together female biographies from regions in both East and West Germany shaped by structural change into a shared narrative of collective experiences of transformation and individual strategies of adaptation.