HELGA PARIS

Twenty years Hanzlová’s senior, Helga Paris also confronts situations that she finds irritating and ambivalent. On display in Kicken II are works from her series Friedrichshain (1993), a series born of the upheavals that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall – and related soul-searching on the part of the artist. In the Volkspark Friedrichshain, a park not far from her Berlin apartment, Paris experimented with a new visual language, one that made room for her own memories and subjective perceptions. With close-ups, crops, and passages that are intentionally out of focus, she shaped personal pictures into a photographic narrative that encompasses both poetic and threatening moments. (Carolin Förster)