Sabina Kaluza. Art and (post)memory

THE PATH TO FREEDOM
 

Sabina Kaluza describes herself as a “German-Polish concept artist”. She was born in Bytom (Beuthen) in Upper Silesia in 1967. From a very early age, Catholicism played an important role in her life, making her feel repressed as a woman and sparking a need in her to break through the existing patriarchal structures. In 1987, she fled to Germany when she no longer felt safe in the socialist People’s Republic of Poland. In the years that followed, she studied under Mara Mattuschka, Lienhard von Monkiewitsch and John Armleder at the University of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste) in Braunschweig.

THE GATEWAY TO REMEMBRANCE
 

Kaluza’s work is characterised by two main motifs: a feminist perspective on the position of women in current society and the family trauma arising from the experiences endured by her grandfather during the war and his subsequent death. Her works are deeply resonant of her own experiences – of growing up in a prudish, Catholic-conservative environment in which all forms of physicality were frowned upon. She is, therefore, a woman and an artist who is constantly shifting back and forth between her own memory and postmemory. Her works combine current themes with issues relating to the past, portraying her dramatic family story as a precondition for the present. To examine her work in greater detail, let us take a look at “schleuse” (“sluice”), produced in 2006 (Fig. 1 . ), which can be regarded as a symbolic gate to the inner world of the artist as well as to our own consciousness. 

POSTMEMORY
 

As a member of the postmemorial generation, Sabina Kaluza points to suppressed memories that are connected to the difficult experiences endured in the past by her parents and especially her grandparents. Marianne Hirsch, who coined the term “postmemory”, clearly links this type of memory with the impact of photographs as bearers of family history: “I see postmemory as being distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through imaginative investment and creation. [...] Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are superseded by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.”[1] In Kaluza’s case, however, these were not only photographs, but also letters that her grandfather had written during the war. These letters were shown and read aloud to her by her grandmother as a kind of relic.

One reminiscence of these memories and the impact made on Kaluza by her family’s story is her installation “JEDEM DAS SEINE, LEO!” (“TO EACH HIS OWN; LEO!”) (Fig. 2 . ), which confronts the viewer with the various prisoner numbers assigned to her deceased grandfather (Fig. 3 . ). After being arrested by the Gestapo, he was forced to suffer unimaginable horrors on his journey of suffering from one concentration camp to another: from 1939–1940 in “Schutzhaft” (“protective custody”) in Beuthen, from 1940–1941 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, from 1941–1942 in Neuengamme concentration camp, in 1942 in Arbeitsdorf concentration camp near Wolfsburg, and finally, from 1942, in Buchenwald concentration camp, where he died from tuberculosis two days after the camp was liberated.