Chiara Wettmann
SeelSorge
A photographic meditation on faith, isolation, and the search for humanity behind bars – what sustains a person when everything else is stripped away? In prison, cut off from the outside world, yet still beneath the same sky – the search for meaning, solace, and connection becomes an act of quiet resistance. In her poignant series SeelSorge, documentary photographer Chiara Wettmann turns her lens to the emotional and spiritual life in Berlin’s Heidering prison, offering an intimate exploration of belief, masculinity, and redemption in a system built to isolate.
Over several months in 2020, Wettmann accompanied Axel Wiesbrock, a prison chaplain at Heidering, whose sessions offer space not for dogma, but for dialogue: an invitation to confront personal histories, trauma, and longing through shared reflection.
Wettmann’s photographs capture the dualities of prison life: confinement and contemplation, absence and presence, the stark geometry of institutional architecture and the softness of human expression, revealing both the psychological weight of incarceration and the fragile emergence of hope.
Wettmann raises urgent and layered questions: What compels individuals toward criminal acts? How are cultural constructions of masculinity implicated in cycles of violence and punishment? And what does true rehabilitation demand—not only from individuals, but from the state that chooses to incarcerate, and must regard reintegration not as a hopeful ideal, but as a necessary responsibility in building a better society?
Far from sensationalizing, this body of work listens. It listens to silence, to vulnerability, to the human need for connection – even, and especially, in spaces where it seems most unlikely.
CREDITS
Chiara Wettmann: from the series SeelSorge, 2020. © Chiara Wettmann.
The exhibition is curated by Marina Paulenka (Director of Exhibitions) and Marie-Luise Mayer (Exhibitions Manager and Project Manager for Emerging Berlin).
The exhibition was conceived in collaboration with the artist and produced in friendly cooperation with our photography print partner WhiteWall.
