Light and darkness are two concepts we often take for granted. We are used to their daily cycles, we switch on the light in our houses when the night takes over. But what if they were not granted to us anymore? What if we didn’t have the chance to switch on the light to make us feel safe? This is something many people don’t always have access to, if one thinks about the people living in places of conflict, or if one thinks of prisoners.

Two artists who lived in very different times, Lothar Wolleh and Nadya Tolokonnikova, experienced this reality first hand. Both of them at one point in their life ended up incarcerated. It is the life and artistic examples of these two artists that inspires us to reflect on the powerful encounter between light and darkness.

Lothar Wolleh

Lothar Wolleh (1930-1979) always felt inclined to the arts. After the war he began studying at the newly established University of Applied Arts in Berlin-Weißensee, confident that would be his path. Things changed pretty fast when in 1950, at only 20 years of age, he was accused of espionage and sent to a gulag in Russia. The prisoners’ camp in question was Vorkuta, in Siberia, a place of unimaginable suffering and hardship. It used to be just a few kilometers away from where Alexei Navalny died last year. It was in that dreadful place that Lothar discovered his love for photography.

Being close to the Arctic Circle, the gulag was often immersed in darkness. There were very few hours of light a day for the prisoners to see, sometimes none. But there, they would be able to sometimes witness a magical phenomenon: the northern lights.

Charmed and comforted by their appearance, the northern lights became a reason to hope and resist the hardships they endured. They helped them find a new purpose. Because of those mind-blowing experiences, Lothar and some other inmates decided to secretly build a camera. It was there, in one of the most inhospitable places in the world, that Lothar became a photographer.

After more than five years of imprisonment, Lothar came back to Germany as a free man. He would carry with him that life experience forever. Lothar left Berlin for Düsseldorf, trying to leave his past behind, and there he pursued his career as a photographer.

Exposing the Shadows

He began working in advertisement. Quickly he became connected to the artistic scene that was developing there, like the Zero Group. His impressive talent made him the portraitist of many other famous artists. Lothar wasn’t simply portraying them. He had the utmost ability to understand and depict them through his keen eyes, creating artworks in their own right.

But what is really interesting and not so known about Lothar’s practice is his relationship with light and darkness. His son Oliver created Lothar Wolleh Raum in order to keep the memory of his father’s work alive and known. He told me once that, if you look carefully at his self-portraits, many of them present the artist in almost complete darkness. The reason behind it has to be searched inside the difficult past that the artist lived, in his time as a prisoner in post Second World War Russia.

Oliver explained to me that a part of that darkness, that his father experienced in Siberia, remained stuck to his dad once he was a free man. That could be one of the reasons why his self-portraits have him often represented as immersed in it. On the other hand though, that troubling life experience made the artist realize the beauty and the power of light, something he would always pursue in his practice as a photographer.

When Light Meets Darkness

Surely there is no photography without light and darkness, but Lothar certainly took this to another level. His research of the light, and the balance with its opposite, became one of the key aspects of his practice. Incredibly stunning is a series of unpublished pictures he took in the Vatican City. There he used the camera to recreate northern lights in a place where we don’t certainly expect them to be.

Yet, this magical light can also be a metaphor for something more. It could represent the physical transfiguration of the power of spirituality, something the artist was also very interested in throughout his career. He photographed all types of spirituality and spiritual leaders, in another very interesting pursuit of the balance between darkness and light.

The unpublished Vatican pictures show us the stunning outcome of his research. His son Oliver believes that one can see this thread – the research and recreation of the Northern lights – throughout a lot of his practice. The poetry behind this is simply moving. As a person who was mistakenly imprisoned and forced to live atrocious things for more than five years, Lothar found a metaphorical and physical light to go on, and to pursue life and happiness.

Of course, something so traumatic always leaves a mark. That is probably why the artist balanced that with his self-portraits, where darkness reaches and surrounds him once again, but this time with his willingness to accept it and confront it. In such a short and dense life, Wolleh represented this ancestral dance with such magistry – probably because he lived it on his own skin – that it permeates all of his art and reaches directly to our hearts.

Nadya Tolokonnikova

Vorkuta, the gulag where Wolleh was sent to, was just a few kilometers away from where now lies another dreadful prisoner camp, the one where the political dissident Alexei Navalny died last year. Navalny was fighting for the right of his country, Russia, to be a different and finally free state. Nadya Tolokonnikova, known as a member of the dissident group Pussy Riot, was a friend of Navalny. These were her words when she was asked to talk about Navalny’s life and death.

Nadya, as a member of the Pussy Riot, also experienced the atrocities of wrongful imprisonment in a penal colony. She spent two years in Mordovia. Nadya was condemned because of the renowned protest she did with other members of the group in Moscow’s main cathedral. She was not the only one imprisoned. Along with her were also Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich.

Art as a Beacon of Defiance

After her release, Nadya  has now become a visual artist, still rebelling against that unfair regime through a new medium. I think what is really interesting is the power of art in overcoming such a painful and traumatic experience. Both Nadya and Lothar reached out to art to express the troubling things they went through. Art became this way a vehicle for them to express and get over them.

Nadya’s practice is a powerful contrast between irony and anguish. She creates funny and challenging objects of resistance, like her colorful Molotov Kits. She also approaches her imprisonment straight ahead, making us try to understand how that feels. In her latest exhibition at Nagel Draxler, Tolokonnikova recreated what used to be her cell inside the gallery spaces. We are instantly confronted with the anguish of its spaces and the roughness of its materials. Yet, she inscribed in them various words about freedom and rebellion, carving a space for light in the darkest place.

The cell is accompanied by various materials, documents and pictures, of her experience in a gulag. They show us the absurdity and the pain that lies behind such a devious prison system. Both Nadya and Lothar had to experience it, in different times. When Lothar was wrongfully imprisoned, the world was certainly polarized. It was the time of the Cold War between Russia and the United States. But if one thinks about it deeper, we can sense a very similar polarization also in contemporary times.

A Shared Legacy

Nadya’s work has a very different approach compared to the work of Lothar. They chose different media to express themselves, photography for him, performance and installation for her. Yet, they both share the same starting point. It is the willingness to overcome the darkness they faced. It is the ability to shred light on something so painful and yet so real. In our gilded cages – way different from the cage installed by Nadya at Nagel Draxler – we often forget the amount of terrible things that are happening all around us. We simply keep on going with our daily lives.

But if we were to stop, and actually think about it all, we would feel a bit of the same darkness that shrouded them. We would understand a bit more of how we take our privileges for granted. We would see how we ignore those people whose rights are still being taken away daily. Their practice gives us also the hope of finding the light nonetheless. It gives us the ability to pursue happiness against the most complicated odds. It becomes in this sense such a powerful lesson, and a memento of this subtle, incredibly twisted dance, that light and darkness are constantly performing around us, so blissfully unaware of it all.

Nadya Tolokonnikova, WANTED, is open at Nagel Draxler until June 6. Lothar Wolleh, The Enemy and his People: Portraits from the Soviet Union, is open at Lothar Wolleh Raum until August 16.