In Berlin
A ‘Pandora’s Box’ of Life’s Struggles and Wonders

A statement from the gallery:

Pandora’s Box will bring together images and scenes, poems and life narratives by the German photographer Signe Mähler and the American poet William Cody Maher. The exhibition is to open July 3 and run through Aug. 2 in Berlin at the Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz. (Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 45, Berlin-Mitte)

In several media — photography, video, poetry, and live performance — Mähler and Maher will introduce a world in which the personal and the universal intersect and mirror one another. The pair will explore how the story of a married couple can echo both global events and private memories — using the past as a lens to see and understand the present. Their work weaves intimate conversations and anecdotes into surreal, dramatic, ironic, and at times absurd depictions of life’s struggles . . . and its wonders.

Together, they invent personas, costumes, and scenes that, in Mähler’s photographs, blur the line between dream and reality—offering an alternative narrative of their shared life and a poetic reading of the world. Maher’s poems, presented as “Timelines,” trace conflicting truths and unexpected turns within their personal story while resonating with broader collective experience.

Signe Mähler was born in Berlin in 1947. William Cody Maher was born in San Francisco in 1950. They have previously collaborated on two documentary films made in the United States: “Along Troubled Roads,” examining the political climate prior to Obama’s election, and “Down Southern Roads,” which looks at the American South following Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. They also produced a short film on the writer and translator Carl Weissner, titled “Mit ‘nem dicken Hals schreib ich am besten!”