Maziar Moradi: I am becoming German

"How can integration succeed?" In times of persistently high levels of refugee migration, this question has become a political issue that is being discussed in a field of tension between welcome culture and isolation. Migration is not a new phenomenon, but has been an integral part of German DNA since the years of the economic miracle at the latest. Nevertheless, current debates often ignore the experiences of migrants who have been living here for a long time. The photo series "Ich werde deutsch" by Maziar Moradi deals with precisely this.

In large-format images, Moradi re-enacts the experiences of people who have left their home country to start a new life in Germany, or who were born here as children of immigrant families and have long been part of German society. In opulent scenes, he visualises moments and episodes of their "becoming German" and thus shows the adversities, personal achievements and milestones of a long process that no one knows exactly when it will be completed. Moradi's work is not documentary, but conceptual. His shots look like stills from a film that have been torn out of the flow of time. In some cases, texts written by the protagonists of the stories themselves explain what exactly happened, while in other cases it is left to the viewer to interpret what is shown.