On July 22, 2011, 77 irreplaceable lives were lost in back-to-back terrorist attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utøya, carried out by the same neo-Nazi.

Werner Zellien is the first artist to visit the horrific crime scene 17 months after the terrorist attack. The result is the work Utøya: a series of 45 photographs taken on one day in December 2012, showing the island under a thin blanket of fresh snow. The first pictures were taken early in the morning when it was still almost completely dark. In a way, the darkness hides the place where the unimaginable has happened. As the day progresses, however, the sun breaks through and it becomes light on and above Utøya. The work is about the slow process of mourning, loss and finding your footing again. Regardless of what has happened, the sun will rise again. That is comforting and cruel at the same time.

Even before the Utøya project, Zellien was already increasingly concerned with places that were historically extremely contaminated. His photo project on the Wannseevilla, where the National Socialist leadership planned the extermination of European Jews, is available as a publication.

In this context, the curatorial decision to show Werner Zellien's Utøya project at the Kunstverein Dresden is also due to the rise of right-wing populist movements in recent years, which have been met with great commitment and civil courage from countless citizens who stand up for universal human rights and humanist works.