After Images

After Images is an exhibition of works by contemporary artists who consciously refer to the time of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. But none of them experienced this time themselves. They all grew up with images, films and stories about it and know that the historical contexts can no longer be detached from their transmission through media and conversations. Thus, they do not even attempt to illustrate the events that precede their personal experience or even to create new images of the horror that defies any representability. Rather, they thematize their own experience of this memory, which is necessarily always mediated by others.

Piotr Uklanski, for example, exhibits under the title ‘The Nazis’ a series of many photographs of actors, some of them well-known, who have slipped into the role of uniformed National Socialists for various feature films. This series of pictures impressively shows how much the film industry contributes to our ideas about the past.

Jake & Dinos Chapman show a kind of landscape model with a road junction on which many rusty Volkswagens have collided with each other, forming a giant swastika at the end. German history as a gigantic rear-end collision?

Finally, in the mid-1980s Bernhard Prinz photographs 16 young women in white blouses, calling the series ‘Reine Wäsche’ (Pure Lingerie) and thus creating not only the impression of beauty and innocence, but also that these images could have come from the 1930s or 1940s.
Even these few examples of after-images show, on the one hand, how strongly history affects the present and, on the other hand, how much memories are visualizations from the now.

What distinguishes the 20 artists is their sensitivity in elaborating their second-hand experiences of the past and their precision in gauging the distance between a ‘history-as-it-was’ and a ‘memory-after-memory’ of that history. The works on display draw their often startling power of visualization from the pool of social memory common to us all. In this way, coming to terms with the past remains an incomplete and unfinishable process.

The exhibition was sponsored by Bremer Landesbank – Kontakte zur Kunst and Bremen Marketing GmbH.