KRISTINE MADJARE
2015 - ongoing
The Retreat series of photographs is about the border between pain and healing where people have to break their sense of worthlessness, helplessness and hopelessness. Through photography I want to explore pain in the body and mind, how we see our pain and that of others, how it affects us and if it can become ours. I’m interested to see how photography can show this distance and isolation of the human mind, being helpless and hopeless.
I took the photos at a Christian commune for people suffering from addiction. Enormous despair and pain brings these people to this place of retreat where they can heal. People have to break their old habits and, in a state of exhaustion, change their thinking through prayers, work and fellowship in the hope of renewing themselves.