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The Art Projects

Lethe, the ancient river of forgetting in the Greek underworld that dispenses blissful oblivion to the dead and in which every recollection is ultimately submerged, is the image that provides this exhibition with its title and its leitmotif. What memories can or must be torn from the currents of the river of forgetting? Why, actually? And in what way, with which aesthetic strategies, is this possible? We’ve invited 29 international artists to cast intense light on this seemingly indissoluble thicket of remembrance, memory, forgetting and repression and to make a contribution to untangling it.

Works by Ursula Witzany (2) and Ruth Schnell (24) form the exhibition’s atmospheric framework. Witzany’s shadow runners accompany tunnel visitors on their way to the prolog as if they were about to enter the kingdom of the dead, and her chandeliers endow the concrete-walled passageways with a nostalgically recalled festiveness. And at the end of the round-trip tour, Schnell’s projected female arm scrubs the floor and walls as if to remove something—or perhaps to bring new strata to light. Search for traces or elimination of traces? At the end, the thicket of remembering and forgetting remains impossible to completely untangle.

The contributions to this exhibition by Kruno Stipesevic (12) and Joanna Dudley (6) deal with forgetting in private. Schopenhauer already remarked in his crude way “that our memory is [like] a sieve whose holes, small at the start, allow little to pass, but get larger and larger, and are ultimately so big that whatever is tossed in falls through.” In his installation entitled “Alzheimer Phase III,” Stipesevic deploys (blank) Post-Its in his struggle against forgetting. In “Tom’s Song,” Dudley uses a wide array of music storage devices to play over and over again the last song recalled by the artist’s grandfather, a man suffering from acute memory loss. In “The Trapdoor,” Tim Sharp (13) screens private footage by amateur filmmakers. They’re sequentially arrayed in repetitive patterns in such a way that they lose what is private about them and come across like documents of a collective history of everyday life.
On the other hand, a three-part video installation by Belgian artist Sarah Vangat (4) impressively shows that learning to speak a language can constitute an island or even a bulwark in the river of forgetting.

Normal everyday life needs no remembrance—or does it? Indeed, way back in 1887 and thus long before the inception of modern brain research, English physician Arthur Conan Doyle marveled at the human mind’s capability to forget things. “Only a fool,” he remarked succinctly, “registers all the rubbish he stumbles upon.” Among the things we would assign to this junk pile would be, for example, our grocery store receipts that, as a rule, are subjected to a cursory check and then quickly consigned to oblivion. Thorsten Goldberg (3) shows another way. He collects these remnants of consumption and arranges them into an impressive archeological dig of everyday life. A countervailing strategy is pursued by Xuan Kan (25). She presents everyday objects—groceries, above all—in a completely unconventional way that makes them seem utterly strange to us and thereby opens up a “new” space for recollection.

Forgetting is also a process of extinguishing that is accompanied by a loss of images. We enter, paradoxically enough, a state of abstraction. We still retain in our memory the pixel-filled static hiss of the TV after midnight from the time before programming ran 24/7. In a series of art projects, such abstract models of forgetting are played out and dispersed throughout the tunnel system as a leitmotif. What might be called the exhibition’s heart is the condensed, pulsating light-and-smoke space by Kurt Hentschläger (18). Visitors are subjected to an intensive physical experience fluctuating between orientation and the utter lack thereof. Ruth Schnell’s (11) light rods also initially come across as abstract objects, but as visitors pass by them, they suddenly turn into illuminated words that, like holograms, appear and disappear when one slightly alters ones point of view. Herwig Turk’s (14) salt desert is a white landscape in which the haptic experience of space and abstract medial images reciprocally suffuse and mutually amplify one another. Renate Herter’s (9) floor installation nestles itself perfectly into the tunnels—white in white—and insistently demands consideration of the barely perceptible transition from solid footing to “river”: a basin filled to the brim is continuously plowed by a rake. A stark contrast to this is provided by the work of Anne and Patrick Poirier (10) that operates with the plethora of content from our world of media. It utilizes recycling material to stage a disturbed, broken space of remembrance in which visitors walk along a narrow path between pressed paper balls through a fragmented landscape mirrored and illuminated by statements like “It’s no longer possible to draw a portrait of a world that’s blowing itself up.”

The exhortation “Never Forget!“ replaces the cynical fascist slogan “Arbeit macht frei” (work will set you free) on the entry gate of the Mauthausen extermination camp during the annual May 4th commemorative march of anti-fascist activists and concentration camp survivors. The remembrance of forgotten and repressed “events” during the National Socialist era and the analysis of its system of destruction occupy the focal point of a whole series of works. They form a link, as it were, between their content and the exhibition’s venue.

The realization that even remembrance is subjective and constitutes a (re)construction just like every narrative, and that diverging contexts are continually revising its significance has been determinative for the selection of the works and for the way the artists have dealt with the “historical material.” Writer Heimrad Bäcker (1) quotes National Socialist documents in his “concrete” texts and exhibits them without adding fictional elements. Visitors to the tunnels are confronted by a blinking neon sign flashing an example of such monstrous bureaucratic phraseology (EXTERMINATIONFACILITATIONS). Another montage technique was used by writer Walter Kempowski (22), who reconstructed every single day from December 1944 to February 1945 from an enormous stock of private documents. What he created thereby is a collective diary that was published with the highly indicative title “Echolot” (Sonar), selected passages of which are presented in this exhibition. Documents are also the raw material of an installation by Peter Weibel (23), who has assembled biographical data on more than 2,500 Jewish scholars, physicians, composers, etc. who made a substantial impact on life in Austria during the interwar period and were murdered by the Nazis or driven into exile. They flow across serially arrayed monitors like a medial stream, counteracting the river of forgetting.

alien productions (0), an artistic group comprised of Martin Breindl, Norbert Math and Andrea Sodomka, have created an audio installation whose soundscape reproduces what might have been heard in the tunnels during an air raid, which they also reconstruct from contemporary eyewitnesses accounts. This is the only work that directly refers to this place’s function during the war. Interviews with the contemporary eyewitnesses themselves will be presented by alien productions in a separate exhibit in the OK.

“Every memory is always the present, never the past. It is a creation, a construct,” is how historian Johannes Friedl summed it up in his book “The Veil of Remembrance.” This process of reconstruction itself is an important aesthetic component of the works of Klub Zwei (Simone Bader and Jo Schmeiser) (19) and Vera Frenkel (20). In Vera Frenkel’s large-scale, multifaceted, multimedia art project about works of art that were stolen by the Nazis and have since disappeared, the grande dame of contemporary Canadian art constantly makes it clear that she is “narrating” and reconstructing from the point of view of the here and now. Klub Zwei, in their video piece entitled “Black on White,” directly confronts the issue of the culture of remembrance by using the example of the treatment accorded to historical photographic documents of the Holocaust—and indeed by means of a radical withdrawal of precisely those pictures that are discussed in the film.

The process of drawing parallels right up to the present and, in numerous instances, establishing connections to the artist’s own biography are important elements of the content of a group of artistic works that deal with very specific political events of the recent past and lift them up from out of the river of forgetting. For example, in a reconstruction of a 1947 Bosnian newsreel in which the artist uses montage and interview techniques, Hito Steyerl (15) also focuses on contemporary patterns of thinking and social structures in former Yugoslavia. Chen Chieh-jen (16) anticipates experiences and fantasies from his own childhood in Taipei when he reconstructs the history of the building across the street using the method of re-enactment. This was the location of the military court and prison in which political opponents of the anticommunist military regime in Taiwan were held until 1987. In Lida Abdul’s (8) powerfully touching documentary film parables, children appear as bearers of hope in the Afghan society that has been traumatized by violence. As a child, she left this very same country after Soviet troops invaded in 1979. In her new work entitled “In Transit,” playing children “transform” the wreck of a downed Russian plane into a dragon. In “Dreamhouse,” a video production by Selja Kameric (7) a refugee barracks is digitally transposed into varying scenic landscapes. The upshot is a dream-like state located somewhere between break-out and imprisonment. Kameric experienced the state of war herself as a child when her hometown, Sarajevo, was under siege.

Monuments are an essential component of the culture of remembrance. Their classic “fixed” form has become problematic for modern art because it “freezes” so to speak one single perspective of remembrance and hardly permits further shifts of significance once the monument has been set in place (except when it’s toppled, of course). A work by Fernando Sanchez Castillo (21) ironically comments on this cult of monuments: it begins as an empty plinth, but when you deposit a coin, a copy of an equestrian statue of Spanish dictator Franco emerges like an evil spirit out of a bottle. Christoph Draeger (5) has created a “monument” of a very different sort for African refugees whose fishing boat was stranded on the coast of Tenerife. In this (limited run) installation of colorfully painted, smashed-up and reassembled boat planks displayed at the deepest point of the tunnel, strata of meaning overlay one another: it can be read as a sign of remembrance or as an impressive, colorful wreck fragment, but also, in the context of the exhibition’s content and venue, as the ship ferrying men and women across the mythical River Styx that marks the boundary between the world of the living and the kingdom of the dead. “Waiting for Sinbad,” the ironic-sounding title that the artist has chosen for his work, opens up contexts in another direction.
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