Falling in Love in Berlin: an exhibition on elective affinities

Is meeting someone in Berlin and falling in love at first sight or a kind of chemical destiny? “Wahlverwandtschaften”, or elective affinities, are the dream behind a photographic exhibition spanning thirty years, which is finally taking shape through the work of twenty-four photographers – fourteen women and ten men – who, without ever meeting or knowing one another, have captured the same image on different continents, in different eras and in different styles. Welcome to Berlin, to Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST, the leading international gallery for high-quality black-and-white photography, where the hostess and curator has created diptychs of literary memory, inspired by Goethe’s novel of the same name. “I found myself in the fortunate position of being able to play Memory for a long time,” the hostess confides to Il Foglio in her Art Deco sitting room at Fasanenstraße 69, in a Berlin lulled by late summer on the quiet avenues of Charlottenburg, just a few days after the recent electoral upheavals.

The group exhibition “Affinità Elettive”, on display until 23 October, brings together a diverse range of photographers, including, amongst others, the Germans Miriam Tölke and Stefan Moses, the Ukrainian Mariya Bilyan, the Pole Marek Pozniak, the Algerian-Parisian Isa Marcelli, the American Sheila Rock, the Chinese Songwen Sun-von Berg and the Japanese Ayako Takaishi, alongside two great masters who are no longer with us: Herbert List and Robert Lebeck. Also featured in the exhibition are the two filmmakers Ulrike Ottinger and Wim Wenders, with two photographs from 1985 taken in Beijing and Tokyo: the director of “Perfect Days” is represented alongside his wife Donata, as is the other Japanese photography couple, Koichiro and Machiko Kurita. Johanna Breede recounts the early days of her career as head of the photography department at the Villa Grisebach auction house, where she remained for eight years, and the sense of wonder mixed with amazement at holding the originals by the greatest photographers of all time in her hands: “It was an exciting and formative experience. On my desk I had photographs by Irving Penn, Saul Leiter, Imogen Cunningham, Steichen, Edward Weston, Renger-Patzsch, Ansel Adams, Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange and many others besides. I loved this work and would read between the lines of the photographs to discover affinities; even then, a desire had emerged within me to create a dialogue between the subjects based on elective affinity. When I later opened my own small gallery, I carried that desire, that dream, with me. However, on occasion I would sell a photograph and, as a result, I would be missing the pair needed to create a dialogue in the ‘Elective Affinities’ exhibition.” Today, this secret dialogue unfolds with beauty and delicacy under the curious gaze of the cultured gallery owner, and evokes the gestures, shadows and situations described in the novel of the same name, a masterpiece of German literature.

In 1808, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – the great poet, writer, philosopher and scientist – borrowed the concept of ‘elective affinity’ from chemistry and alchemy, subjects of which he was a leading scholar, to develop his ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’. He thus describes the uncontrolled and entirely random attraction that leads certain substances to break away from existing structures and recombine with others, driven by deeper and equally uncontrollable forces. Goethe was sixty years old, at the height of his artistic output, and, despite being married, became infatuated with the eighteen-year-old Wilhelmine Herzlieb, known as Minna: he first dedicated a series of sonnets to her, then even gave her a gold ring, but the girl rejected him with a certain detachment. The Master’s heart is shattered, but it magically recovers through the crafting of the novel, in which he recounts that impossible love by creating the character of Ottilia – the ethereal orphaned niece, modelled, of course, on Minna. In the novel, the girl arrives at the country estate of Carlotta and Edoardo, and Edoardo falls madly in love with her; then Carlotta loses her head over the Captain, who is also a guest at their estate. Just like chemicals that recombine, the two couples break up and come back together in a whirlwind of uncontrollable passion and tragedy.

It is well known that Goethe’s tumultuous love life has always fuelled his writing, and this relentless intertwining of love and death has transformed Elective Affinities into what Thomas Mann, another restless giant of German literature, described as ‘our greatest novel, a miracle of compositional happiness and purity, astonishing in its richness of relationships, its intimate connection and its cohesion’. For Mann, Goethe was more than a spiritual father; he was a constant presence throughout the career of a writer who explored the decadence and eroticism of the bourgeoisie like no other. And in Johanna Breede’s exquisitely composed diptychs, we find precisely this: contrasts, forms, lights and gestures that seem to respond to intangible yet very evident spiritual resonances, such as those described in the novel.

“A beautiful foot is a great gift of nature, a grace that never fails,” declares the Count with great emphasis; he is one of Edoardo’s guests, infatuated with the foot of Carlotta, Edoardo’s wife, whose little shoe he would like to kiss with devotion. Immediately, the gaze is drawn to the corner wall at the entrance to the PHOTOKUNST gallery, where Yuriko Takagi’s shoes – photographed for a Comme des Garçons advert in 1995 – seem to wink at Donata Wenders’ ‘Red Shoes’ from 2009. And what of the graceful feminine nape of the neck photographed in Paris by René Groebli in 1952, reflected in another nape of the neck photographed by Donata Wenders fifty-three years later, in Japan? Goethe’s novel opens with Edoardo and Carlotta grappling with the redevelopment of their estate’s park – trees to be felled, new plants to be introduced – a perfect metaphor for what the four characters – Edoardo and Carlotta, their niece Ottilia and the Captain – will find themselves experiencing as their lives take on a new form. Goethe writes this in the opening lines of the novel: “To the right, the valley opens out and, once past the vast expanses of trees, the gaze is lost in a crystal-clear distance”. With that same gaze, in the purity of white, Johanna Breede must have juxtaposed the ‘Frozen Tree’ – photographed in Norway by Jens Knigge in 2015 – with the identical bare tree photographed by Koichiro Kurita in Japan in 1987. And again: on re-reading the scene in which, returning from his walk near the old mill, Edoardo turns to look at Ottilia, who “followed him without fear or hesitation, leaping lightly and with perfect balance from stone to stone; it seemed to him as though he were seeing a celestial being hovering above him”, one’s gaze is drawn to the two photographic collages by Isa Marcelli (2021) and Miriam Tölke (2022) which, one in Paris and the other in Berlin, in a mysterious and enchanting way give shape to the face of the same girl.

Those most surprised by these uncontrolled and uncontrollable affinities are the artists themselves. Mariya Bilyan describes the gallery owner as “a magnet for like-minded artists; it was her brilliant eye that brought us all together so easily. “That’s a rare occurrence these days.” Donata Wenders shares this view: “What a precious gift Johanna has given us!”, says the German photographer of the gallery owner-alchemist’s work. “Finding my images, which I know so well, placed side by side like brothers and sisters with other photos by my colleagues was like meeting family members I hadn’t met before. What a joy and what a sense of belonging.” The same sentiment is expressed by Berlin-based Kathleen Alisch, who is thrilled to find her work displayed alongside that of the Japanese photographer Koichiro Kurita: “It feels like an extension of my intense periods in Kyoto. Perhaps it is a deeply rooted interplay between chance and intention, which ultimately brought us together in his darkroom in Japan and now on this wall.” Chemistry and chance are the surprising paradox underpinning the entire exhibition: photography captures the moment – “there are only coincidences”, said Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1971 – and yet it seems to have its own predestination. Very different photographic styles are linked not as chance encounters, but as if they already knew one another before meeting on Johanna Breede’s walls.

“In fact, for me, elective affinity is above all a dialogue within a completely unforeseen and unexpected situation,” adds Donata Wenders, “arising from something that drew me in, which I couldn’t explain and which I could never have planned in advance”. “Sometimes an image appears in my mind even before I encounter the subject in reality,” says the Japanese-born Parisian photographer Ayako Takaishi, “it almost seems to me as though the photograph already existed before the moment I took it, as if time had, for an instant, folded in on itself”. “When I started taking photographs,” says Isa Marcelli, “I realised straight away that I wasn’t seeking technical perfection, but that, on the contrary, I preferred the traces of a certain imperfection. I’m interested in the idea of vulnerability: we are unique and singular, but also fallible human beings. And when I take a photograph, I’m no longer solely responsible – chance becomes my ally.” Chance also plays a significant role in the ink drawings of Songwen Sun-von Berg, who was born in Shanghai but lives in Berlin: “When I arrived at the opening, I was surprised to see my drawings alongside the photographs by Jens Knigge and Ayako Takaishi. I hadn’t met them before, and all three of us had worked completely independently.” Jens Knigge also emphasises how deep his connection with chance is, referring to his photograph taken on the frozen Lake Baikal in Siberia: “I was struck by the deep bond that the local population, predominantly Buddhist, forms with the waters of the lake. I photographed ice formations and abstracted the images by inverting their tones, thereby creating space for free interpretation and the imagination.” Time and space, therefore, are broken down and reassembled on the walls of Johanna Breede’s gallery, and the photographic memory of these extraordinary artists now becomes a collective unconscious, which cannot be controlled or planned. And at the very same time that photographers who have never met are drawn to one another, two musicians from vastly different backgrounds are also experiencing an equally uncontrollable elective affinity that produces music perfect as the ideal soundtrack to this dream-like exhibition: Anushka Chkheidze and Robert Lippok, she aged 29, he aged 60, are releasing their second collaborative album, The Sky Was Out of Tune, a dreamlike 25-minute piece published by the prestigious Morr Music label.

“It was composed for the Festival of the Future at the Neue Nationalgalerie in November 2025,” says Lippok, “we wanted to create something dense yet unstable, in which noise, harmonies and melodies coexisted, whilst each retained its own identity”. Anushka Chkheidze, born in Tbilisi, Georgia, is regarded as one of the most promising talents on the contemporary Caucasian music scene, whilst Robert Lippok has written some of the most significant chapters in Berlin’s musical history: with his brother Roland, whilst they were still living in the former GDR, he created that wild sonic blend of electronica, post-rock and ambient, first with the duo “Ornament und Verbrechen” – named after the title of the famous essay written in 1908 by the architect Adolf Loos – and later with the brilliant To Rococo Rot. “We met in Tbilisi in 2019, during an improvisation session at an ambient music workshop. Anushka played the piano and, within a minute, I realised I wanted to work with her. The clarity, simplicity and beauty of the chords and melodies she played immediately touched my heart,” Lippok says as we stroll through the area where Kreuzberg meets Neukölln – the two most creative and multi-ethnic neighbourhoods of this city that never seems to sleep. For him, too, the image that Goethe borrows from chemistry fits his conception of music perfectly: “The collaboration with Anushka was entirely unplanned, and yet from the moment we started it seemed inevitable, as if our sounds already knew each other in some way before they met. That’s why I hold dear the phrase by Donna Haraway (the American feminist theorist, ed.) ‘make kin’ – creating kinship, alliances and mutual responsibility.”

The ‘Elective Affinities’ showcased by Johanna Breede reveal the marvellous enigma of the connections between human beings, just like the music produced by Chkheidze and Lippok. And, as Goethe writes in the final pages of his novel: ‘If one of the two had been confined to the far end of the house, the other would, instinctively and without meaning to, have gradually drawn closer to him. Life was an enigma to them, the solution to which they could only find together.”