Discipline and Senses is the title of the first major retrospective dedicated to the German artist Hans Georg Berger, whose photography has always explored both intimate and cultural identities. The title unites in a single discourse the profound intellectual experiences and research conducted over a period of almost fifty years, from the 1970s to the present.

The fil rouge of the project has slowly emerged through a long dialogue with the artist. As the curator Francesco Paolo Campione states, "Hans Georg Berger has deliberately chosen photography as an existential remedy, as a solid instrument to give form to his own identity and to his universe of senses and dreams; it is something that alleviates, through art, the suffering generated by a hostile social context".

His incessant research has allowed Berger to involve the richness of his own inner world. His exploration has thus progressively widened from the intimacy of his relationship with the French writer Hervé Guibert (1955-1991), to the social dimension of the inhabitants of Rio nell'Elba, and finally, after a long journey across Asia, to the representation of Theravāda Buddhism and Shiite Islam. Both the journey and the destination are marked by the exercise of a strict intellectual discipline that, firstly applied to his own life, has become a language capable of capturing the essential features of his reality.

Berger's approach is based on the ethical, and not only aesthetic, centrality of the photographed object. An extraordinary journey, probably unique, within the field of contemporary photography.

Hans Georg Berger was born in Trier in 1951. He studied Philosophy of Religions at the University of Munich and at the University of Vermont (USA). At the beginning of the '70s he worked as actor, scriptwriter and director of the group Rote Rübe and, from 1977 to 1983, as director of the Internationales Festival des Freien Theaters in München and co-founder of the Münchener Biennale.

From the end of the '70s he started working on the renovation of the hermitage of Santa Caterina, on the Island of Elba, transforming the ancient Franciscan convent into an international art center and creating a botanical garden dedicated to the native flora of the Tuscan Archipelago. Alongside his experience on Elba, in the 1980s Berger began a series of long-term photographic projects, focusing above all on the cultural dimension of ritual and meditation as a source of spiritual research. The privileged field of his research and training activities are Laos, Thailand and Iran, countries in which he has stayed on several occasions and for long periods, weaving an extensive network of relationships which also fostered the creation of important international cooperation projects. In the city of Luang Prabang, ancient capital of the Kingdom of Lan Xang and, until 1975, residence of the King of Laos, Berger founded in the late 1990s the Archive of Buddhist Photography with the aim of preserving and enhancing a unique heritage of over 35,000 images taken by monks from the invention of photography to the end of the twentieth century.

To date, Hans Georg Berger has produced more than forty books and has had more than sixty solo exhibitions in all major countries in Europe, the United States, Japan, and Southeast Asia. His works are included in the collections of some of the most important art museums in the world.

A portrait by Daniela Zedda