Zwischen uns die Geschichte

These images were made in places where this history took place, and in places where it is preserved: archives, landscapes, memorial sites. Some images show what is there. Others intervene or are reassembled. None of it is finished. The arrangement of these images is a juxtaposition. A probing. An act of endurance — because this history was never something I could simply appropriate. I grew up with it. It was there before I knew what history even was. It was clear, unambiguous, meaningful. A narrative in which no doubt was intended. It had something of the fairy tale about it — not as a lie, but as a system, and I was part of it. Only later did it begin to shift. Images no longer held. Places became legible. Violence emerged. What had been told as closed fell apart. History grew larger, more contradictory, unfit as a source of meaning. These works do not attempt to repair that. They refuse that order. Places like Butovo or Ravensbrück do not appear here as a past one can observe. They remain open, unwieldy, present. The collages and archive fragments are shards — attempts to approach something that resists being grasped.

— APPROACH —