Exhibition Views
GESPENSTER
Solo exhibition: Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück, 17 August 2024 – 31 March 2026 GESPENSTER began after the death of my mother and my aunt, when I inherited a family archive I hadn't known existed. At its centre is my great-aunt Käte Niederkirchner, a resistance fighter murdered at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and the gap between the heroic narrative built around her and the silence that surrounded her in our family. In the GDR, Käte was everywhere: schools, collectives, sports clubs, streets bearing her name. And yet as a child I knew almost nothing about her. The story was too large and I didn't feel equal to it. I never asked questions. What the archive revealed was more complicated than any heroic myth. Behind the official story lay other stories, including that of Käte's brother Paul, who was murdered in 1938 and erased from the family narrative so completely that for decades his fate was reduced to a single line in my grandmother's biography: "My eldest brother Paul died in the Soviet Union." The project was supported by the Fondation Tour du Monde and the Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten.