While visiting the Bertolt Brecht archives in Berlin, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, recipients of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2013, discovered a remarkable artefact: Brecht’s personal bible.
The object caught their attention because it had a photograph of a racing car stuck to the cover. Inside the pages they discovered that the German playwright had used his bible as a notebook; pasting in images, underlining phrases and making notes in the columns.
This was the inspiration for their own illustrated Holy Bible, which they realised first in book format (published by Mack, 2013) and since shown at Goodman Gallery as a full-scale exhibition. For this project, the artists have combined images taken from The Archive of Modern Conflict – the largest archive in the world dedicated to images of war and conflict – with phrases in the text which they have underlined in red ink.
A short essay by the Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir underpins the work. In his writing, Ophir observes that God reveals himself in the bible predominantly through acts of catastrophe, and considers the biblical text as a parable for the growth of modern governance.
