Ania Bien (born 1946) is an American photographer. Born in Kraków, Poland, to Polish-Jewish parents, she moved to the United States in 1958, where she studied painting and cultural anthropology.[1] Since 1973 she has lived in Amsterdam.[2]
One of Bien's early projects, Hotel Polen, referred to the Hotel Polen fire (which became "part of Bien's wider theme of destruction"[3]) in Amsterdam, 1977, and established her reputation in Dutch art circles.[2] The collection of photographs illustrated a hotel before World War II, showcasing the relative luxury of middle-class travel in Europe, but objects in the photographs associated with the Holocaust indicate that this was a "doomed" way of life.[4] She fabricated 18 replicas of the hotel's menu stands, and used them to display the photographs; the purposely large panels could not be examined en masse, requiring observers to move from image to image.[1] David Levi Strauss, writing in a chapter focusing on Bien in his 2003 book Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, called the art piece a "polysemous work of absence, in which what happens between images is the most important."[1] The work was displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1987 and at the Amsterdams Historisch Museum in 1988.[5]
Some of Bien's work is concerned with Franz Kafka; one of her photographs has her place her hand on a portrait of Kafka's, in response to a note he wrote in 1924 to Dora Diamant, "Place your hand on my forehead for a moment, so I can gain courage." Her 1989 installation Past Perfect asked "what would have happened had [Kafka] not died in 1924, but instead had come as a refugee to America in the late '30s."[6] It gained her international recognition,[2] and was also shown in Jerusalem.[6]
Bien is interested in war, discrimination, and the plight of refugees.[2] She contributed photographs from a centre for asylum seekers in Haarlem to a 1994 book on refugee children in such centers in the Netherlands, Ontheemde kinderen.[7]
Bien has also exhibited at Portfolio Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland,[8] and the Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam.[2][9]
From an exhibition organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 15 May-2 August 1987 and the Amsterdams Historisch Museum, February-March, 1988.