‚Lost in Perfection - In Frankfurt Johanna Diehl explores ideal cities in Sicily‘
in: ‚Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung‘, 7.Januar 2012, Author Swantje Karich

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Johanna Diehl’s photographic eye is conceptual. First she forms an idea or a theme. Then she sets off in search of her motifs, and it is on her journeys that her concentrated works emerge. In 2008 she was in Cyprus, a country that has been divided for more than 38 years. The south is Christian-Orthodox; the north, Muslim. From the island she brought back astonishingly moving factual images of the interiors of former churches and mosques now used as places of worship by the other religion. In these strictly analogue photographs the attributes of Christianity for example mix with the objects and formalities of Islam: the abandoned pulpit next to the prayer mat; lines of sticky tape on the floor of a slowly crumbling Christian architecture used to shepherd the rows of seats of the Muslim congregation.

Now the artist has turned to another architectural theme. The series currently on show at Frankfurt’s Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf is called Borgo. Johanna Diehl came across the idea for the series in the legend surrounding the founding of the town of Mussolina on Sicily. It is the story of an ideal city dreamed up by Mussolini. When the dictator enquired into how it was progressing, those in charge did not want to admit that they had never even started to implement it – in fear they sketched up complex drawings and photographed them. The artist, for her part, went in search of a real motif, namely the twenty or more ideal settlements that were actually built in Sicily’s hinterland between 1926 and 1943. They were all given a piazza, a church, a post office, a school and a party building. The steeple of the church was never allowed to tower above the party headquarters. Today many of these borghi are abandoned. Already in Mussolini’s day they were rather unpopular; too isolated in the middle of the fields.

All the failure, but also the sheer beauty, of this utopia is clearly manifest in Johanna Diehl’s photographs. The buildings, like backdrops, demonstrate the government’s failure to convince the farmers of their plans. Today forty per cent of the towns are completely deserted. We see squares bereft of urban life, lost in the ordered perfection that lends them a spectral beauty. The art of photography that lies in the precise use of focus, light and perspective achieves perfection in the work of Johanna Diehl. She is an exceptional photographer. (Runs through to January 21. Prices from EUR 1800 to 8500 depending on format. Edition 5+2 or 3+1)

SWANTJE KARICH

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‚Ghost Villages - Johanna Diehl at Tolksdorf‘
in: ‚Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung‘, 21.12.2011, No. 297, p. 40, Autor Christoph Schütte


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In the 1920s Italy’s fascists sought to repatriate farmers who had fled their land for the cities with a project designed to build so-called borghi for them, i.e. small supply centres with a piazza, post office, church, school and party building; the project met with only moderate success. A large number of these villages built literally from the ground up were abandoned soon after completion; others were never settled. Today most of the twenty or so borghi completed on Sicily stand entirely vacant.

For her photo series entitled Borgo and now on show at Frankfurt’s Galerie Tolksdorf, Johanna Diehl visited many of these ghost villages named after fascist heroes, illustrating beyond the traces of melancholy the Berlin artist’s keen interest in the genius loci. It is about the connection between utopia and profane reality, between architecture, history and ideology as well as the vestiges they leave behind to fade away with time.

And it is not just that everything seems so strangely oversized and almost monumental. Diehl’s Borgo also condenses the views of churches, squares or streets of houses into an idealised settlement type, illustrating what all borghi on closer examination were always destined to be: a construct. Johanna Diehl, who was born in 1977 and studied under Timm Rautert, brings ideology and propaganda as well as politics and failure closely together with the aid of her large-format camera, ultimately rendering a complex image of reality.

CHRISTOPH SCHÜTTE

The exhibition at Frankfurt’s Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf, Hanauer Landstrasse 136, is on show today from 11 am to 6 pm.

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Rights of reproduction and use for F.A.Z. content may be obtained at www.faz-rechte.de

‚BOOKS OF THE MONTH - Johanna Diehl: Displace‘
in: ‚Monopol Magazin‘, May 2011, Author Sebastian Frenzel


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Hence the religion: the houses of deities and the dead in Johanna Diehl’s photographs
In her book titled Erinnerungsräume Aleida Assman quotes the literary theorist Stephen Greenblatt: “It began with a desire to talk to the dead.” The young Berlin-based artist Johanna Diehl began by photographing her grandmother’s house and the homes of other deceased people. Then in 2008 she travelled to Cyprus and took photographs of abandoned places of worship. Displace is the title of her series of photographs. It features interiors that remind us of the wounds suffered by a country forcibly divided, interiors as victims of war.
In 1974, Turkey occupied northern Cyprus after the Muslim population had been the victim of repeated attacks by Greek Cypriots. What came next was ethnic cleansing on both sides and the partition of the island, which remains divided to this day. Johanna Diehl’s photographs are silent witnesses of this exodus. They tell the story of how Christians and Muslims have dealt with the religious legacy of their former neighbours. While in the south the mosques have simply been left to deteriorate, in the north the churches have been converted into Muslim prayer houses. Indeed, displace means both to relocate and to replace.
There is something absurd about these scenes of transference and re-coding. In the Orthodox churches, carpets have now been laid out and prayer niches and staircases (minbar) incorporated for the imam to deliver his Friday sermons. Drapes serve as partitions to separate the men from the women, with the consequence that in some mosques women now pray in what used to be the sacred area of the chancel. There is something provisional about it all, as if the interiors themselves have little faith in their function.
The picture in the island’s Christian south is quite different. Diehl reports that the mosques were quickly tidied up shortly before she arrived for her photo shoot. But the crumbling plaster of the façades and the dust on the ground clearly show that these sacred buildings have no place in the present. Here cold ignorance is the counterpart to the stage-like activity to be found in the north.
In the past year her photographs have been on show at Berlin’s Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf among others, alternating large-format individual photographs with serial sequences reminiscent of the typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher. The recently published catalogue has adopted a similar layout, but is a work in its own right. And while the reader has the option of browsing through the volume geographically, from north to south as it were, Diehl has deliberately inserted the hiatus of blank pages, playing with contrasts as well as the structural similarity of the sacred buildings.
For centuries Christians and Muslims lived as neighbours on Cyprus. And as insurmountable as the barrier between the cultures now seems, ultimately it is a matter of inches, as the cover photograph makes clear. It features a gothic church interior with prayer mats laid out on the ground, strips of sticky tape pointing towards Mecca. Churches are of course also oriented to face east, but clearly some very precise measurements were taken as part of the redesign.
The topicality of the works is obvious, and yet it is not exhausted in their political relevance. Ultimately, the photographs are about the nature of photography, which always merely depicts the presence of something absent; about architecture, its present haunted by its past; and about the origin of religion: it began with a desire to talk to the dead.
Sebastian Frenzel
Johanna Diehl: Displace. Fotohof Edition, 76 pages, EUR 35.

‚Fluchtlininen nach Mekka‘
in: ‚taz / die tageszeitung‘, 11.08.2010, Author Annedore Beelte


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‚Die Guerilla ist da‘
Article in: ‚Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung‘, 09.04.2010/Nr.82, Author Niklas Maak

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‚Glaubenssache - Kirchen zu Moscheen: Fotografien von Johanna Diehl in der Galerie Tolksdorf‘
Article in: ‚Der Tagesspiegel‘, 03.04.2010, Author Simone Reber

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‚New Life Painted on the Ruins‘
Article in: ‚Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung‘, 25.10.2009/Nr.43, Author Niklas Maak

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The dividing line that splits Cyprus since 1974 is both political, as well as religious: The south is Christian Orthodox, the north is Muslim. Photographer Johanna Diehl shows the ruins of abandoned places of worship on both sides of the divide. They recount the drama of a country. By Niklas Maak

History has left behind ruins on both sides. In 1974, the president of Cyprus was overthrown in a coup supported by the Greek junta; then came the pogroms against the Muslim population, whereupon Turkey occupied the Northern part of the island. What followed was a dramatic exodus in both directions; the story of which is still evident in places of worship on both sides. In the south stand abandoned mosques, gaps in the architectural story of the republic. In the Turkish occupied North, many of the abandoned churches underwent different treatment: many were transformed into mosques.

Johanna Diehl, one of the most interesting photographers of her generation, has recorded these emptied, idle or transformed places of worship on both sides. The formal rigor of her photos are only at first sight reminiscent of the Becher school; their specific quality lies precisely in their narrative details and the divergence from typification. Graffiti sprayed over an iconostasis; all images removed from another. Elsewhere churches are covered in carpets; lines drawn with crepe tape point in the direction of Mecca and the prayer niche, the mihrab is simply painted on the wall. In these inscriptions and superscriptions of architecture, the complex political history of the country reveals itself in a surprisingly haunting way. As in Johanna Diehl’s previous work about Odessa, her almost surreally precise eye for minimal formal details – the pattern on a shirt, the tape on the floor – has succeeded in shedding light on the individual, as well as collective fate of human beings. The fact that these people are rarely visible in the images reinforces the effect of the projection, like in a Hitchcock movie. An effect also evident in Diehl’s previous series “Frozen Spaces”, in which she documented the rooms of the deceased and other places that have been preserved unchanged, where the rooms gradually transform from the stages housing everyday life into monuments of absent existence.

(Until November 7th at the Atelierfrankfurt. The series will be shown in the Gallery Fiebach&Minninger, which represents Diehl, in Cologne from January 2010.)

‚Reading History into the Spaces‘
Article in: ‚journal Frankfurt‘, 22/2009, Author Grit Weber

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Since 2008, Johanna Diehl has repeatedly traveled to Cyprus and transported her large format camera to small villages either in the Turkish north or in the Greek southern part of the island. There she sets up her equipment in former churches or mosques and photographs with long exposures and minimal aperture. The pictures tell the story of the wounds that the places have received since the ethnic cleansings of the 1970’s. They are scenes of abandoned Orthodox churches into which prayer niches and minbar have been built in since the expulsion of the Greek population. Carpets with ornamental decorations point to Mecca. Or images of abandoned mosques in the south of the island. The walls were whitewashed just shortly before the photographer’s arrival; but piles of pigeon droppings still lie on the bare floors. Sacred spaces, no matter in honor of what God, are always highly symbolic. History is full of destroyed, mutilated or simply reappropriated spaces. But Diehl’s photographs not only add another layer of images to these histories, they also tell the tale of how tentative such endeavors are. (...). >> Wisdom is transcultural, timeless and learnable: for example in this show.

('Displace', Exhibition, Ffm: Atelierfrankfurt, Hohenstaufenstraße 13-5, until Nov 7)

Walk-In Memories
Article in: 'ZEIT CAMPUS 3/2007', Author Malin Schulz


For her diploma project ‘Frozen Spaces’, Johanna Diehl has gone in search of traces of life in abandoned apartments.

What remains of me, when I am no longer here? The bed, in which I slept? The shirt that I wore? The opened page of my favorite book? When someone leaves home or dies, the room in which he lived becomes a silent witness of his history. Spaces, in which time seems to stand still. A dress still hanging, where it was hung years ago. An imprint on a pillow, a fold in the carpet that no one straightens. It seems as if the dead or the departed continue to exist, if only in the way the porcelain figurines are arranged or how the blanket on the bed is turned up. We approach these places with respect and awe. Opening the cabinet, regarding an object that the deceased last touched. As if someone is still there.
Photographer Johanna Diehl has gone after this feeling with the camera and photographed such long since abandoned spaces. She traveled to fourteen places across Germany, asked for keys to empty houses and apartments, tiptoed across creaking floorboards and opened doors that had been locked since years. “Of course that was pretty creepy sometimes. Once I was in a cellar and turned on the light, when suddenly the radio began to play loud music”, she recalls. “Later I found out that the owner had connected the light switch with the radio.” Some of the former inhabitants had passed away, some simply moved away. Some rooms were still looked after by those remaining behind, who kept their spouse’s room exactly the way it was on the day of their death. Johanna Diehl calls these places “frozen spaces”. They are walk-in memories.

“I began taking photographs of the abandoned rooms in my grandmother’s house”, says the photographer. “It was like a jump backward in time. The room my father lived in as a child, my grandfather’s old office. Everything was exactly like in those days when I was a child. Now nobody is there anymore, and yet I still felt a strange presence. This feeling fascinated me.” With the help of friends and family she began to look for uninhabited houses and apartments. Johanna Diehl doesn’t focus on documenting the fate of the former residents, concentrating instead on the atmosphere of evanescence. And that is why she does not reveal any details about her pictures – the spaces, furniture and objects should tell their own story.

For her photographs, Johanna Diehl changed nothing, not a single piece of furniture was moved for compositional reasons. This allows each room to retain its uniqueness, it special atmosphere. “As soon as you change something, the feeling is lost. You can see it, for example, in museums, where possessions of deceased are also exhibited,” says the photographer. “But you can no longer feel their former owners.” It almost seems as if Johanna Diehl’s photos aren’t images of rooms, but portraits of the people, who lived there. “Although I was no longer as afraid as time went by,” she says. “The feeling of respect and awe never went away.”