Impasse Hotel Syria – Photographs by Krass Clement

The motifs are snapshots from a reality that now, 16 years later, no longer exists. Developed in shades between black and white, we see people in the process of carrying out life’s many activities. A girl is hiding behind some sandals in a shoe store; a man is squinting in a train car. Somewhere in a city, a woman stops on her way down the stairs and looks back.

Pulsating everyday life is not the only thing that the camera has captured: a curious stagnation is also evident. Streets and sidewalks are dusty and bumpy; cables and wires hang loose. Most shop signs are from days gone by, just like the cars and policemen’s uniforms. The same timeless portraits of the country’s president or the president before him – his father – are omnipresent in windows and on walls.

Krass Clement is a poetical photographer. This is obvious to anyone who has seen even a small selection of his many pictures from a 40-year career. The photographs from Syria are also a form of poetry. They invariably bring to mind the present and current catastrophe, especially in Aleppo, but they also bring us something else. They hurt and soothe, as only art can.

Krass Clement has been awarded a lifelong grant from the Danish Arts Foundation and is represented in such institutions abroad as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and in Denmark in the Brandts Collection, Designmuseum Danmark, and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

There is free admission to the museum and the exhibition, which will run until October 22, 2017.