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cologne reviews
by Rosanne Alstatt
christian boltanski
at jule kewenig and the institut francias
The walls of Jule Kewenig's castle-gallery
in Frechen, Germany (near Cologne), are
covered from ceiling to floor with perfect
rows of grainy, black-and-white
photographs. Images from Christian
Boltanski's 1995 "Menschlich" (human)
exhibition in the Vienna Kunsthalle fill
the room with mathematical perfection. This
does not detract from the warmth of
Boltanski's subject, which seems to be a
documentation of lost souls. Among the
images are portraits of missing children
staring into the camera, dead persons from
the "Suisses morts" series, and Nazi
soldiers sitting relaxed with their friends
and families. These are the kind of
photographs that are usually tucked away in
forgotten photo-albums holding the tragic
past found in every family and society,
particularly those with a Fascist past. The
overwhelming number of images and mixing of
different subject groups enhances the
individual photographs' anonymity and
increases the installation's ability to be
chilling and sentimental at once. They are
photographs of a post-Holocaust Europe.
Today they are viewed as figures from the
past haunting the present, a reminder that
tragedy is never too far away.
The parallel exhibition at the "Institut
Francais" shows books, photographs and
other documentary materials carefully
assembled in glass cases. With Boltanski's
newspaper-clipping esthetic, the
configuration of forgotten objects, persons
and histories seems to be opened up for the
interested, but able to be easily
overlooked by those who do not want to
bother with digging up the past.
ROSANNE ALTSTATT is a critic and curator
working in Cologne.
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