Marissa Roth: One Person Crying – Women and War (Berlin)

From 8 March until 3 April 2013, Berlin-based Willy-Brandt-Haus presents the exhibition One Person Crying: Women and War with photos by Marissa Roth. Since 1984, the Pulitzer Prize laureate (born in 1957 in Los Angeles) is dealing with this issue: back then, she travelled to the Yugoslav homeland of her Jewish grandparents who had been murdered in 1942 by Hungarian Fascists. In 1988, she was assigned by Los Angeles Times to portray Afghan women refugees. The subject remained crucial for her work: One Person Crying: Women and War addresses the effects of war on women within their respective societies.

The series consists of telling portraits of survivors, refugees and bereaved from various regions and wars in the world: women who survived the Second World War and the Holocaust; refuges from Kosovo and Afghanistan; mothers and spouses of  US soldiers who were killed in the War in Iraq. The work includes the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland and gang-based violence in Los Angeles, too. It is one of her central aims to show the women not as victims, but as survivors.

Roth said: “This project led to face-to-face encounters with hundreds of women, who withstood and survived war and the connected experiences of loss, pain and inconceivale hardship. I travelled the world, taking photos of women, interviewing them, writing down their stories, saving gestures and horrible details, to document how war had irrevocably changed their lives. … I was forced to give both faces and voices to the women’s perception of war. In the pictures is no appearance of blood or weapons; they solely show those lives that are being lived in a constant postwar context.”¹

At the opening on 7 March 2013, the artist, Gisela Kayser (Freundeskreis Willy-Brandt-Haus) and Selmin Çalışkan, Secretary General of Amnesty International Deutschland, will speak.

 

One Person Crying: Women and War
Photos by Marissa Roth
8 March until 3 April 2013, Tu-SU 1200-1800h (closed on Good Friday, open on Easter Monday)
Admission free, but an ID card is necessary
Opening: 7 March 2013, 1930h

Willy-Brandt-Haus
Stresemannstr. 28
10963 Berlin
Germany