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.
One of Bien's early projects, Hotel Polen, referred to the Hotel Polen fire (which became "part of Bien's wider theme of destruction"[2]) in Amsterdam, 1977, and established her reputation in Dutch art circles. 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.[3] 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.[4]
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." It gained her international recognition, and was also shown in Jerusalem.[5]
Bien is interested in war, discrimination, and the plight of refugees. 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.[6]
Bien has also exhibited at Portfolio Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland,[7] and the Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam.[8] [9]