Visit from Ghosts

, 2016



Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension
Video Still from A VISIT FROM GHOSTS, Loop, 10 minutes, variable dimension

Ausgangsmaterial des zehnminütigen Videoloops VISIT FROM GHOSTS ist die fotografische Dokumentation einer Hausdurchsuchung, heute im Archiv des „Bundesbeauftragten für Stasiunterlagen“ aufbewahrt. Nach der gescheiterten Republikflucht des erwachsenen Sohnes durchsuchte die Staatssicherheit der DDR im Jahr 1984 die Wohnung einer Familie. Die Bilder wirken wie ein Apparat, der aus einem Alltag einen Tatort und aus einer Gegenwart keine Zukunft generiert. Aber dieser Apparat bringt die Präsenz der doch unsichtbaren Personen nicht zum Verschwinden, und er hinterlässt leere Räume, in denen sie leben wie Gespenster.

 

Erinnerungskonzepte sind mitunter widersprüchlich, die Transformation von Bildmaterial, entstanden unter spezifischen politischen Bedingungen, in den Kontext von Kunst mitunter fraglich. Meine künstlerische Adaption ist der Versuch, jene Aufnahmen 30 Jahre später und aus einer veränderten Gesellschaftsordnung heraus zu verstehen. Hierfür ergänzte ich den visualisierten Gang durch die Familienwohnung und über das Grundstück der Familie mit Gedanken und Fragen zu Perspektiven der Betrachtung und Kontextualisierung von fotografischen Bildern.

 

"... The ghosts of the past are closer at hand, so let's get to know them better ... The installation A Visit from Ghosts is a space where the unseen or the unspoken comes to light; it is a backdrop for displaying different, often contradictory memorial projections, whose collisions plays out not only in the public sphere, but in the dimension of the imaginary. ..." (Katharina Mishchenko, Curator Visual Culture Research Center Kyiv, Ukraine)

 

 

To look at a photograph is to look at the past and have proof that what I am seeing happened. Whether it is true, I do not know. It is truthful. After the son's failed escape from the Republic, the GDR's state security forces searched the G. family's flat near Rostock in 1984. The source material for the ten-minute video loop Visit from Ghosts is the photographic documentation of this house search, which can now be found in the archive of the Federal Commissioner for Stasi Documents.

 

 

Concepts of memory are sometimes contradictory, the transformation of visual material, created under specific political conditions, into the context of art sometimes questionable. My artistic adaptation is an attempt to understand those photographs 30 years later and from a changed social order. For this purpose, I supplemented the visualised walk through the family flat and across the family's property with thoughts and questions on perspectives of viewing and contextualising photographic images.

 

 

What do I know about the two people who were visited by State Security agents in the German Democratic Republic in 1984? What of the photographer who documented the flat and the search? I know nothing about the people, not their appearance, their age, not even their names. The pictures seem like an apparatus that generates a crime scene from an everyday life, a crime from a dream, no future from a present. But this apparatus does not make the presence of the nevertheless invisible persons disappear, and it leaves empty spaces in which they live like ghosts.