DAMASCUS. Traces of memory

Frizzi Krella, art historian, author and photographer, was born in Dresden in 1970. She grew up in divided Berlin, took photographs from childhood onwards, spent time in the darkroom and, after the fall of the Wall, travelled to worlds both near and far.

She studied art history, archaeology and Romance literature and linguistics in Berlin and Paris. Her photographic gaze penetrates water, air and earth, transforming reality into images. Structures and lines, the haptic and the sensual become immediately visually perceptible with great ease.

She traces paths of thought and uncovers traces of memory. In this way, she opens up a universe that invites us to lose ourselves in it and, at the same time, to find ourselves again.


"Damascus has always been a memory. Perhaps it was never anything else, even for those who came before us. We liked to walk through it, live there, photograph it. That did not change the fact that the city remained a memory; and as a memory, it was indestructible." (Stefan Weidner)

In Damascus, the historical layers of millennia-old cultures and religions overlap and merge with the present. Frizzi Krella sets out in search of traces in this city, which she begins to record with her black-and-white photographs. From the poetry of the immediate, a layering of memories emerges, the visible and the invisible merge into a visual essence

‘If I were to describe Frizzi Krella as a muse, she would be Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and mother of the muses, and what she photographs, if we can still speak of photography here, are those ideas, that higher world behind the shadow images.’ (Stefan Weidner)


Frizzi Krella
DAMASCUS
Traces of Memory
6 February to 6 March 2026
Opening reception: 6 February | 7 p.m.