You look different from afar

You look different from afar was created during the pandemic as a collaboration between Lara Wilde and her grandmother, the artist Ruth Bubel-Bickhardt.
Both were isolated, but from very different points in life. Lara was in Berlin with a small baby. Ruth was in Hanover, carrying nearly a century of lived history with her. What felt like a rupture in one biography was, measured against the experience of a world war, an inconvenience in the other.
The work brings together Lara’s pinhole photographs of an emptied Berlin and Ruth’s copper etchings. Two generations, two cities and two media are placed in direct conversation through structure, association and visual response. Over the course of the project, more than 80 works emerged from this exchange.
The distance between them is not only geographical. It is historical, generational and deeply personal. The collaboration became a way of staying close while allowing those differences to remain visible.
You look different from afar is a conversation between two artists who happen to be grandmother and granddaughter, separated by age, experience and one very strange moment in history.