Poem at the Bottom of a Teapot
Category: Mixed Media
The A-Cloud
“Shut your mouth, otherwise sawdust will fall out of your head!” Kuhle Wampe (1932, screenplay: B. Brecht)
Phantom
“People take photos of each other
To prove that they really existed
To make sure they are there
People take photos of each other
Believing that those moments
Would stay alive for all time”
Excerpt from: Menschen Machen Fotos gegenseitig, Die goldenen Zitronen (Songtext)
About the Resistance of the Turtle Shell
Black Headscraf
2013, Photo album, different papers, acryl, gaze, 34 x 21 x 6 cm,
An old family album is filled with personal spiritual connections to the past: letters, pictures, words…. It is an attempt to reconstruct the past with the means of the present. But how much truth is there in it? And how much utopia?
The greater the distance in time and place to the past, the more the truth is reduced to the essential – a metaphor about space and time, about home and childhood.
The headscarf is a symbol. It tells of femininity and oppression, of tradition and religion, of yesterday and tomorrow. The headscarf plays an important role in many societies. In fact, the black headscarf is the most striking thing I remember from my childhood as a member of the German minority in Romania. It was a visible sign of marriage and “Germanness”. The headscarf still accompanies me in my life today: socially, politically, personally.
This work is available as a physical object or video.
Letters from Utopia
The letter is a relic today. Until recently, it was the most important medium of communication between people in distant places. It expresses the synchronicity of physical distance and inner closeness. It is emotionally loaded – why else was it lovingly stored in shoe boxes or torn up in anger? The letters here are metaphorical bridges to a place of longing that exists only in memory – a very personal utopia.
This work took part in the X-Border-Art Biennial in Rovaniemi / Finland and in the Open Art Biennial in Örebro /Sweden. Virtual tour.
Drum Bun
What is memory? Nothing more than a collection of data in long-term memory that is neither objective, nor complete, nor necessarily true. It is also not always available.
But remembering is also a creative process that must always be reinterpreted and is therefore subject to constant change.
The room installation shows 7 processed sheets of paper hanging from the ceiling by a thread. Every breeze created by a passing visitor causes the sheets of paper to rotate, so that they cannot always be seen in their entirety. The result is an overall picture that is fragmentary and constantly changing – just like a memory.
Mothers and Sons
“… we can easily recognize many religious motifs, images of saints and depictions of the Mother of God and the infant Jesus. The artist begins to interweave these with photographs from her own past. In a fascinating way, she combines living people she herself knows, such as her own mother, and interweaves them with the Mother of God, placing her in the center or putting a different, larger head on the depiction of the saint, which is irritating and leaves me amazed at the ease with which this seems to succeed. (…) The child, the infant Jesus, is exchanged with perhaps the brother or someone else and it becomes comprehensible for all of us that the infant can only develop with trust in its mother. (…) The artist also shows us that this cannot always succeed by allowing robotic demons to emerge, by completely blackening and veiling the mother, by building a multitude of disturbances into the relationship and we sense that we ourselves carry an enormous number of disturbances within us. “ Helm Zirkelbach on 24.04.2016, opening speech for the exhibition “Ansichtssache”
Can a mother love her son more than her daughter? Is there a special relationship between a mother and her son? The exaltation of male offspring and the devaluation of female offspring takes place primarily in patriarchal societies, but here too, albeit subliminally. What is remarkable, however, is that it is often the mothers themselves who shape their children’s self-esteem through education and thus keep the vicious circle going.
In 2015, I worked on a postcard from my collection every day – most of them with the motif “Mary with the baby Jesus”, the archetype of all mother-son relationships. In the end there were 365 collages about motherhood and childhood.
This was an annual project initiated by Antje Fischer, realised together with her and Marlies Achermann-Gisinger. All the works of this project with more than 1000 postcards were presented to the public in the joint exhibition Ansichtssache (Point of View) in Münsingen.
Virtual tour through the exhibition.
Evidence
2014, collage, frottage, photo album, photographs, acrylic paint, various papers, wax, 34 x 21 x 6 cm
The photo album is a metaphor of doubting one’s own existence – a documentation of traces that becomes worthless when no one remembers the stories behind the pictures. I bought this photo album at the flea market and re-stocked it – an archive of traces with stories that open up to each viewer in their own way.
This work is available as a physical object or video.
Below the Surface
2014, photo album, photography, mixed media, wax, 27 x 19 x 8 cm
A surface is the outer shell of an object. A surface envelops, protects and conceals secrets. The leather cover of a book or photo album is, literally, the skin that protects the pages and thus also the contents. Since the invention of the camera, it has become a tradition in the Western world to preserve the collective memory of a family in photo albums and thus document one’s own origins. It was passed on from generation to generation.
However, the collective memory does not last (Aleida Assmann) and after three generations it has changed so much that a family album can lose its ideal value. I buy such family albums, which have obviously become worthless, at virtual flea markets. I dissolve their collective memory in order to create a new, universal one.
In this work I invite the viewer to cast their voyeuristic gaze into an unknown photo album. Page by page, layer by layer, he penetrates deeper beneath the surface of a cryptic narrative – a story that opens up to everyone in a different way.
This work is available as a physical object or video.
