TOM HOLERT

Sanja Iveković: On the Humming of the Community. On the Barricades

What does it mean to close the eyes of the dead? This gesture is familiar from countless films. A corpse is found, the hand of a bereaved person or a police officer brushes over the face. Closing the open eyes of the dead person—this action seems so familiar, yet only a few people know it from real life. So familiar, in fact, that the question is rarely asked about what it actually means.
Sanja Iveković has also closed the eyes of the dead. In her project “On the Barricades” for the 8th Gwangju Biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni under the title “10,000 Lives”, the Croatian artist used portrait photographs of people who have been dead or declared missing for thirty years. All of the people portrayed were victims of a days-long massacre carried out by military and police on the people of Gwangju beginning 18 May 1980. In the 325 pictures, which were made available to Iveković by the archive of the May 18 Democratic Association for Honorable Persons and Victim’s Family, the dead or missing people are seen as they looked in life, their eyes open. With the help of Photoshop and partly using additional photographs, Iveković closed the eyes of the people in the photographs digitally. This resulted in a gallery of about 316 reconfigured black and white pictures, partly composed from different visual information, of people appearing before the viewer with closed eyes. Those who gaze without looking. Who do not return the gaze, but reject it gesturally. Who surrender themselves to darkness.
It would be possible to speak and write this way. But does this actually bring us closer to the intentions and effects of Iveković’s intervention? What is the status of these portraits? How and what do they mean? Why was the artist so angry, when she read in the brochure of the Gwangju Biennale and the wall text in the exhibition space, that she closed the eyes of those portrayed “to signal that the victims have found their final rest”?

Text feature in Camera Austria International 113/2011, pp. 11–22.

SEBASTIAN CICHOCKI

Yael Bartana: We Will Be Strong in Our Weakness

Fragment of an entry from

18 April

At night somebody smeared a huge sign on the fence of our kibbutz reading: L.A.S.T.L.E.A.K. I don’t know what the abbreviation stands for. Nobody does. I’m afraid it might be some evil spell, some kind of
a Polish curse that we should all perish and finally go to our own hell. These are the moments which hurt the most—when you don’t know, you understand nothing, your language disintegrates. It seems to be lying in heaps, all those letters and awkward words with their hissing endings.

Let me ask again, will we be understood?

A false assumption must inevitably lead to false comparisons.

And what about historians?

Historians are incredibly powerful in Poland. They are next to national poets, whose significance was rightly compared to the significance of prophets in ancient Israel. The responsibility of a Polish historian is huge. This is somebody who has been entrusted with the treasure of identity, who is to carry it through chaos and save it. For this treasure not to be lost, it is not enough to just hide it well. Buried money rots, currency depreciates, metal jewellery rusts. Our historians rarely review the deposit. They would never even think of attacking the historical taboo, let alone question the very principle of discretion that governs their club. In keeping with this principle, just admitting the fact that historians are affected by events they write about, which make an impression on them—terrify them, move them, haunt them or force them to drop the subject—would be something absolutely unthinkable.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 113/2011, pp. 23–34.

RAIMAR STANGE

Heidrun Holzfeind: On the Inside of the Outside(r) 4 Fragments

1. — Heidrun Holzfeind’s artistic work critically focuses again and again on outsiders in very different ways. The video “Demo Derby” (2001), for instance, portrays crash car races from the USA that could be called asocial, which have no other goal than to demolish cars. “The Romanians” (2002) centres around the story of a man and his wife who fled from the Ceauşescu regime to Austria in 1990; “The Mystery of God Revealed” (2004) follows a 63-year-old singer, actor and author on his three-year odyssey through various homeless shelters and other social welfare facilities. The video projection “Exposed” (2005) presents the inner world of a 35-year-old dancer from the USA, who suffers from chemical intolerance, reacts allergically to her environment because of this chronic illness, and is therefore forced “to live outside the norms of society” (Heidrun Holzfeind). In eighteen videos of the work “Mexico 68” (2007), protagonists of the 1968 students movement in Mexico are interviewed; in “Colonnade Park” (2011), finally, the artists speaks with residents of the apartment complex so named in Newark, who seem to live isolated from their surroundings in this—typically American—apartment complex under video surveillance and guarded by security forces. As different as the life stories are of the (presumed) outsiders presented here, what they have in common is that significant problems of the society, in which their lives take place can be read from their stories. The carelessly destructive actions of the demolition drivers in “Demo Derby”, for instance, are commented on by a stadium speaker with the words, “This is what America is all about”, in the video that begins with the US American national anthem—interpreted by Jimi Hendrix. Yet it is not only that: the essence of the automobile mercilessly destroying the life habitat of us all is made available for aesthetic disposition in the tersely shot film presented without commentary.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 113/2011, pp. 35–46.

JULIA BRYAN-WILSON

Sharon Hayes

What does it mean to talk in pictures? We wanted to see if we could conduct a dialogue out of images—as part of a longer conversation, both formal and informal, that we’ve been having for many years. In part, it is an experiment to break out of the expected critic-writes-about-artist format; in part, too, it is a way of stimulating fresh ways of thinking oriented towards and through the visual; in part, lastly, a way to evidence the complex and intertwined genealogies that contribute to who we are as a writer and an artist. What are the ethics of thinking this way through images, “using” them to conjure thought, drawing out of and away from them, perhaps, arbitrary parallels? (Or is that question beside the point, as images by their very nature are promiscuous?) In what follows, paying attention to our own ambivalences, we let the images guide our discussion. […]

Dear Sharon,
I am immediately struck by the overly posed quality, and the band of witnesses cordoned off in the distance … I agree the racial politics here solicit many questions.
This image made me think about returns to past traumas, the compulsive “working through”, as Freud called it. The artist Allison Smith, whose practice is persistently concerned with modes of memory and re-enactment, has done a lot of work about Civil War restagings. Recently she did a project based on research she conducted at military museums regarding World War I and II cloth gas masks. She remade the masks—themselves very vulnerable, strange looking objects that seem entirely too fragile to protect against the horrors of chemical warfare—by hand out of ordinary materials, and then took pictures to mimic archival documents. I’m sending you one that has some eerie Ku Klux Klan associations; it resonates with the image you just volleyed over. To work this terrifying history over by hand, as Allison does, is to use craft somewhat against type—for handicraft is typically seen as a domestic and conservative way of making. Allison has talked about these masks as a kind of hidden history of textile handicraft, and quotes Peter Sloterdijk’s book
Terror From the Air, which makes the claim that modernity began with the use of gas warfare. — Julia

Text feature in Camera Austria International 113/2011, pp. 47–58.

WALID SADEK

A Time to See 1/4 The Present of the Image

When we stand before “The Death of Marat”, we do so belatedly after the event of murder. We stand in the presence of ink still damp and uncoagulated blood and search, not without regret, for a life just missed. In doing so, in desiring to undo a regretful belatedness by returning through the painting to what the painting tells and hides, we come to partake in forming the present of the image. David’s painting hangs in a present, an extended present, because it rides on an insufficiency which more than summons our attention: it absorbs us in an affect wherein the visually given is burningly close to what is no longer visible. The present of the image persists when the no-longer-visible is not yet relegated to the emotivity of loss nor stably coded as representation. It is a present that absorbs because a return to what is not inexorably past, a reversal of events, a restitution of the fallen seems almost possible. The present of the image is a space of absorptive affect, one where affect, not equal to an emotion experienced within the relative boundaries of subjectivity, is an intensity that moves through the viewer and sends him or her always towards an imaginable and near tangible before.
David’s “Death of Marat”, hanging in an extended present, entails an implicit revision of the conventional act of standing before a painting: to stand before it is to already be engaged in looking back at a past we desire to be future again. And yet what is troubling in David’s painting is the knowledge, implicit in the gracing of skin, that what appears before us is no more than the last image of a halted temporality. Beyond it the present of the image might have to surrender its hold on the present of seeing and be led, down digressive paths, to follow the myriad life courses of embodied eyes no longer absorbed in the affect of looking back.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 113/2011, pp. 73–74.