The exhibition “Silberstreif” (silver lining) by Berlin-based artist Daniela Friebel is based on the estate of the East German particle physicist K, taking viewers back to the early days of a divided Germany. The series centers on private letters from 1950 to 1964 that trace the development of a young man finding his intellectual and existential footing during a time of historic upheaval. Friebel transforms this private archive into a multi-layered work of photography and text that examines the relationship between personal experience, contemporary history, and memory. The physical material of the documents—creases, handwriting, and perforations—transports images, symbols, and metaphors.

K, born in Dresden in 1935, earned his high school diploma in 1952, then went to university and wrote his doctoral thesis at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Dresden University of Technology. In 1960, he went to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna (then in the USSR), where he worked for four years. From the mid-1960s onward, he worked at the Institute for High-Energy Physics in Berlin-Zeuthen, where he worked alongside Friebel’s father for several decades. Written correspondence chronicles his journey from the end of his school years through his time at university to his early professional years. In the letters, tales of everyday life, friendships, and photography mingle with questions of freedom and responsibility as well as the political and social conditions of the time.

In her artistic interpretation, Friebel is less concerned with reconstructing a biography than with exploring how the past reveals itself through traces both material and linguistic. The large-format photographs show magnified aspects of the preserved documents: folds, tears, traces of glue, punctuation marks visible on the back, lines, or paper fibers. In the close-ups, such details come loose from their original context and appear as abstract visual spaces. The question where they come from becomes clear only at second glance. Even the edges of letters stacked on top of one another appear as horizontal layers—a deposit of time and the written word.

Friebel juxtaposes the photographs with fragments of text from the letters. Here, too, the artist works with close-ups and details. Excised from longer correspondences, these thoughts prove receptive to interpretations that are relevant today—for example, when K notes in 1959:

And is freedom of choice not possible for us, or at least the belief in it? […] Are we perhaps particularly constrained in those very places where we think we are completely free?”

In a typographic reinterpretation, handwriting, typewriter text, and aged paper recede into the background; the historical texts appear in a contemporary form. Dates, senders, recipients, and locations are saved and mark the stream of correspondence between people and geographical spaces.

While the words may certainly evoke mental images and ideas, the photographs seem in large part ambiguous. In “Silberstreif”, the two planes converge: the models of thought preserved in the letters and the photographic exploration of their material traces. Between what can be read and what becomes visible, a perspective of the past is revealed—one that simultaneously questions the present.

Daniela Friebel (born in Berlin in 1975) studied linguistics and literature at Humboldt University in Berlin, as well as photography and fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts (HGB) in Leipzig. In her work, she explores the conditions of the perception of images and how images derive their meaning from experiences, expectations, context, and perspective. In 2025, she received the Lotto Brandenburg Photography Prize. In 2018, she was awarded the Haus am Kleistpark Photography Work Scholarship; and in 2021 and 2023, she was nominated for the Haus am Kleistpark Art Prize.