Meetings Without Translation: Reading with Katja Petrowskaja // PANDAwomen
Why do some images meet our gaze, resonate, and stay with us for so long? What happens to our perception in a time of visual overload?
As part of the PANDAwomen 2026 festival and our signature series “Meetings Without Translation”, we welcome writer Katja Petrowskaja for a conversation about photography, memory, war and a fragile relationship between words and pictures.
Two books will be at the heart of the evening: In “Das Foto schaute mich an” (2022) / “The Photograph Looks Back at Me”, Katja Petrowskaja brings together her photo columns written for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and creates a genre of her own: short prose that condenses landscape, biography, research and contemporary history. Photographs encountered in the newspapers, exhibitions and social media, or found by chance in family albums, or archives become starting points. An apparently incidental image opens onto a much larger historical space: be it a ghostly plant from Chernobyl or a miner from the Donbas, a naked woman on the cover of an old record or a cloud in the sky. What is our present made of?
Her book “Als wäre es vorbei. Texte aus dem Krieg” (2025) consists of texts written between February 2022 and autumn 2024, which inevitably form a chronicle of the war against Ukraine and ask what happens to our perception when grief and horror recur for years and become part of everyday life for some and “not our war” for others. How do we keep looking without becoming numb? What can a photograph preserve, and what remains outside the frame? What lies behind resilience?
We may also touch on her first book “Maybe Esther” (2014) about a modern person, stumbling through history, and talk about a recently published anthology of Ukrainian prose selected and edited by Petrowskaja.
Katja Petrowskaja was born in Kyiv in 1970 and has lived in Berlin since 1999. She studied literature and Slavic studies in Tartu and received her doctorate in Moscow. She is a columnist of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. Her debut, “Maybe Esther” (2014) has been translated into thirty languages and has received numerous awards (including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and the Aspekte Literature Prize). Her work has been widely translated and internationally recognized.
The conversation, moderated by Sveta Müller, will be held in German.
Admission: 19:00. Free entry.
Venue:
PANDA platforma
Knaackstraße 97 (im kleinen Hof der Kulturbrauerei)
10435 Berlin
Accessibility: A ramp is available for wheelchair access. A toilet is located on the Kulturbrauerei grounds. Please contact us in advance on +49 30 44319557 to arrange your visit.
