Finissage: Radu Darvas – Wiedergutmachung

In the organizer's words:

Photographs from Transylvania 1994/95

Radu Darvas, born in 1973 in Bucharest, first studied there at the Academy of Arts and later in Dresden at the Academy of Fine Arts. As a young boy, he was given a camera and discovered photography. But it was only a few years later, in the period before and during the '89 revolution, that Radu began to photograph more and more intensively. He developed the pictures in the bathroom of his prefabricated apartment in Bucharest. If it were up to him, he would just take pictures, but what emerged are photos with a fine artistic eye that have gained historical value over time. His style dissolved the distance between himself as a photographer and the people in front of the lens.

Radu Darvas passed away in 2015. His photographic estate comprises several thousand black and white negatives and around 70 developed analog images. Mira Darvas, Radu's second child, wanted to take care of the estate, which led to a small project funded by the Department of Culture. With the help of her aunt (Anca Darvas) and her mother (Heike Tuellmann), she is working on archiving the negatives and photographs and examining what she has seen, some of it familiar and much of it unfamiliar. The complete digitization of all negatives has not yet taken place. Further rolls of film turned up both in Bucharest and in Dresden. The material that has already been viewed forms the basis for the "Wiedergutmachung" exhibition and provides a very unique insight into Viscri / Deutsch-Weisskirch in 1994/95. Wiedergutmachung, a word that Radu taught his sister, probably a bit of a joke. But today "reparation" also brings a little peace and closes many circles.

Radu Darvas and Heike Tuellmann met in Viscri in 1994, a time when many young people had already emigrated from their native Transylvania and often only the older ones stayed behind. For a year, Heike looked after a house belonging to Initiative Rumänien e.V., where club members, travelers and Bucharest residents slept and listened to music in the kitchen. During the day, they helped the villagers in the fields, in the house and in the yard, doing chores for the association and the villagers. They listened eagerly to their stories. Radu was always there with his camera, capturing moments that today seem a hundred years away from a German perspective. Viscri is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Emigration and tourist development have brought about serious changes in the town compared to the time on display.