Memory, Empathy and Image:
The Art of Luise Schröder (Germany)
and Kitra Cahana (Canada)

September 13, 2021 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

| Free

Discussion with artists
Luise Schröder (Germany) and
Kitra Cahana (Canada)

Moderated by
Ori Z Soltes, PHD
Teaching Professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC
Introduced by
Rachel Stern
Director and CEO of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York NY

This program explores the work of two young artists — Kitra Cahana, from Canada; and Luise Schroeder, from Germany — whose photography, documentary filmmaking and other work have been informed by an acute awareness of the myriad complications that have beset diverse individuals and groups within the complexities of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century world. Their inspirational sources range from the Holocaust to the Black Lives Matter movement as, in similar and yet very different ways, they focus on and champion under-represented and under-considered subjects who struggle within often callous or oppressed conditions and yet survive and even, ocassionally, triumph.

Generously sponsored by the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in New York.

IMAGES (both details):
LEFT: Luise Schröder, re-ENVISIONING (Vergegenwärtigen), 2004/05
RIGHT: Kitra Cahana, Caravane Migrante: The Question of the Future, 2018

Kitra Cahana is a freelance documentary photographer, videographer, a photo/video artist and a TED speaker. She is a contributing photographer to National Geographic Magazine. She has a B.A. in philosophy from McGill University and a M.A. in Visual and Media anthropology from the Freie Universitat in Berlin. Her work ranges from photographic studies of American Teens for National Geographic Magazine to documentaries on the annual life-saving dance competition in a small town in northern Canada. She is renowned for work that consistently reflects a deep sense of empathy with her subjects.

Kitra is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including two Canada Council Grants for the Visual Arts, a 2016 TED Senior Fellowship, a 2015 Pulitzer Center for Investigative Reporting grant, a 2014-2015 artist residency at Prim Centre, the 2013 International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award, first prize for the 2010 World Press Photo, a scholarship at FABRICA in Italy and the Thomas Morgan internship at the New York Times.

Luise Schröder is a visual artist working in France and Germany. She studied Photography and Media Arts at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany. Within her artistic practice she is dealing with aspects of “history in the making” from a today’s perspective. She is interested in how cultures of remembrance and commemoration are influenced and formed by political agendas, media and image production and how this affects identities and communities. In recent years, Luise Schröder has taken part in numerous single and group exhibitions, among others at the Rencontres International Paris/Berlin (FRANCE), at the Kunsthalle Baden Baden (GER), at the Gallery EIGEN+ART (Berlin/Leipzig, GER), and at the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Alongside numerous other distinctions, the artist got the C/O Talents Preis [C/O Talents Award] in 2012 and the SpallArt Price Salzburg in 2020. Furthermore she held a residency at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles in 2016 and was awarded a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in 2018/19 in Paris by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. Recently she is working on her project: La Barricade – Existing as a promise, which is supported by the French Ministry of Culture CNAP and Ateliers Médicis.

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