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Ania Bien

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Ania Bien (born 1946) is an American photographer. Born in Kraków, Poland, to Polish-Jewish parents, she moved to the United States in 1958, where she studied painting and cultural anthropology.[1] Since 1973 she has lived in Amsterdam.[2]

Works

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One of Bien's early projects, Hotel Polen, referred to the Hotel Polen fire (which became "part of Bien's wider theme of destruction"[3]) in Amsterdam, 1977, and established her reputation in Dutch art circles.[2] The collection of photographs illustrated a hotel before World War II, showcasing the relative luxury of middle-class travel in Europe, but objects in the photographs associated with the Holocaust indicate that this was a "doomed" way of life.[4] She fabricated 18 replicas of the hotel's menu stands, and used them to display the photographs; the purposely large panels could not be examined en masse, requiring observers to move from image to image.[1] David Levi Strauss, writing in a chapter focusing on Bien in his 2003 book Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, called the art piece a "polysemous work of absence, in which what happens between images is the most important."[1] The work was displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1987 and at the Amsterdams Historisch Museum in 1988.[5]

Some of Bien's work is concerned with Franz Kafka; one of her photographs has her place her hand on a portrait of Kafka's, in response to a note he wrote in 1924 to Dora Diamant, "Place your hand on my forehead for a moment, so I can gain courage." Her 1989 installation Past Perfect asked "what would have happened had [Kafka] not died in 1924, but instead had come as a refugee to America in the late '30s."[6] It gained her international recognition,[2] and was also shown in Jerusalem.[6]

Bien is interested in war, discrimination, and the plight of refugees.[2] She contributed photographs from a centre for asylum seekers in Haarlem to a 1994 book on refugee children in such centers in the Netherlands, Ontheemde kinderen.[7]

Bien has also exhibited at Portfolio Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland,[8] and the Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam.[2][9]

References

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  1. ^ a b c Levi Strauss, David (2003). "A Second Gaze". Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics. Aperture Foundation. pp. 115, 118. ISBN 1-931788-10-3. Retrieved 2024-05-09 – via Internet Archive text collection.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Home: Ania Bien" (in Dutch). Joods Historisch Museum. Archived from the original on December 17, 2013. Retrieved 12 December 2011.
  3. ^ Cooper, Emmanuel (April–May 1995). "Rev. of Warworks: Women, Photography and the Iconography of War". Creative Camera. p. 41.
  4. ^ Osborne, Peter (2000). Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. p. 178. ISBN 0-7190-4400-6. Retrieved 2024-05-09 – via Google Books.
  5. ^ "Hotel Polen//Ania Bien". siris-libraries.si.edu. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. Retrieved 2024-05-09. From an exhibition organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 15 May-2 August 1987 and the Amsterdams Historisch Museum, February-March, 1988.
  6. ^ a b Levine, Angela (11 October 1991). "Photo-based art". The Jerusalem Post. Archived from the original on January 31, 2013. Retrieved 12 December 2011.
  7. ^ Haijtema, Arno (2 January 1995). "Fotografen portretteren jonge vluchtelingen in asielzoekerscentra: Kinderen in een niemandsland" [Photographers Portray Young Refugees in Asylum Seeker Centers: Children in a No Man's Land]. de Volkskrant (in Dutch). Archived from the original on February 22, 2013. Retrieved 12 December 2011.
  8. ^ Bien, Ania (1992). I-D nationale. Edinburgh, Scotland: Portrait Gallery. ISBN 978-0-9520608-0-2. OCLC 30555690.
  9. ^ Bien, Ania; Leo Divendal (1993). Home. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Joods Historisch Museum. ISBN 978-90-801562-1-0. OCLC 55990120.
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