2015.05.09, BERLIN

The image of a section of the Berlin Wall which survives in situ belongs to a cycle of photographs taken by Krisztina Erdei during her travels in the countries of the former Eastern bloc. Erdei is considered a leading voice of her generation – those born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who barely remember communism but are sensitive to the cultural and visual aspects of the political transformation. Critics place her explorations within the circle of similar tendencies in the art, and especially in photography, as practiced in the former satellite states of the Soviet Union.

Erdei’s photograph is both a documentary and a genre image. On the one hand, it shows a section of the Berlin Wall at a definite historical moment, on 9 May 2015 – that is seventy years after the ending of the 2^nd World War in Europe. What has been photographed is one of the most iconic and historically loaded remnants of this structure: the graffiti showing the kiss shared by Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in October 1979 in East Berlin. Brezhnev’s visit was occasioned by the 30^th anniversary of the foundation of the German Democratic Republic, and a ten-year agreement of mutual support between the Soviet Union and East Germany was signed. The mural was painted by the Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel in 1990 (that is, after the fall of the Berlin Wall), and the image itself is modelled on a photograph by Régis Bossu, documenting the embrace of the two communist leaders. The ambivalence of Vrubel’s work, which bears the inscription “My God, help me to survive this deadly love” in Russian and in German, arises from the clash between the image itself and the ground on which it has been created: an embrace, which (supposedly) connects, and a wall, which divides.

On the other hand, Erdei successfully captured two women posing, with the graffiti behind them, for a selfie that would soon immortalize their kiss. The frame contains one more woman, walking along the wall. The arrested encounter of the two kisses, a repetition of the gesture and the tension that arises at the meeting point of two realities lie at the core of Erdei’s photograph. The kiss of the two leaders – an essentially homosexual one, even though fraternal and performed in a non-intimate situation – is here juxtaposed with the imminent kiss of the two women – a gesture which in the communist reality was acceptable only in the conventionalised conditions of a greeting or a congratulatory embrace, not in the context of erotic love.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz