Sabina Kaluza. Art and (post)memory

POSTMEMORY AND THE REALISATION OF THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
 

As Hans Belting has established, our ancestors hand down certain images to us. Through the dynamic process of being passed on, these images are repeatedly modified, forgotten, newly discovered and re-interpreted, “[…] because images can only be answers for a certain length of time; after that, they no longer suffice for the questions of the next generations.”[2] These are just the kind of questions being asked by Kaluza, who represents one of these generations. In her installation “JEDEM DAS SEINE, LEO!”, she invites us to look through a lens produced by the Carl Zeiss company (Fig. 4 . ) into the interior of a transparent cube containing the prisoner numbers of her grandfather. Sitting down in front of the work and looking through the magnifying glass, we become immersed in the artist’s family history, which becomes a universal story, a representation of countless thousands of fates similar to that of her grandfather. The numbers pulse in front of our eyes, enlarged by the lens made by a company that used forced labourers during the war years. In this way, the artist creates a paradox: an optical tool created by Zeiss, a company which would be only too happy to obscure its dubious past, points to the victims of the National Socialist regime and to the company itself as a participant in a criminal system. In addition, Kaluza has drilled the names of concentration camps into an outer wall of the installation (Fig. 5 . ) in a particular form of Braille, so that people with impaired vision can also read them. However, their presence is also important for viewers who are able to see, who look through the lens and are able to feel the indentations at the same time, thus enabling them to access and interpret the installation through their sense of touch. As the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman once wrote: “Every past is definitively anachronistic – it is able to exist and be formed solely through the figures that we assign to it; it therefore exists only in the operations of the ‘presence of memory’, a presence that has the wondrous, but also dangerous power of realisation and subsequent processing and portrayal.” As a “figure from the past”,[3] Kaluza’s installation forges a relationship between ourselves and her grandfather and so many others who suffered a similar fate. Two old jute sacks (Fig. 6 . ) from her grandfather’s estate are also included in the installation. They exude a dusty smell; their soft surface contrasts strongly with the rusty metal frame, thus reinforcing the impression of the transient nature and fragility of life. By consciously using the different qualities of these materials, Kaluza therefore not only activates postmemory, but also recreates the past, setting it clearly in relationship with the here and now. In so doing, she not only brings particularly personal aspects to the fore, but also forges a connection with topics relating to German-Polish history that remain a sensitive issue today.

As an artist who chooses to meet the challenge of postmemory, Kaluza has also produced the installation “D-DAY HEERESGRUPPE MIT FRANZ” (“D-DAY ARMY GROUP WITH FRANZ”) (Figs. 7 . , 8 . ), which can be regarded as a formal equivalent to “JEDEM DAS SEINE, LEO!”. This time, however, she suspends oval metal platelets on strings within a steel frame. Some of these platelets pile up on the floor within the steel frame (Fig. 9 . ). When we move around the installation, the platelets begin to move gently, producing an almost inaudible sound and creating the impression of sounds from times long past permeating through to us here in the present. “D-Day” refers to 6 June 1944, the day on which Allied troops from the US, Britain, Canada, and France landed in Normandy and opened up a second front against the Third Reich. Could it be that Kaluza is using the number of metal platelets, which represent the individual soldiers’ identity tags, to make us aware of just how many died during the fighting that occurred then? (Fig. 10 . ) And who is Franz, anyway? He is the artist’s grandfather, whose numbers were 3./A.R., 162 and – 174 – in the line below on the identity tag (Fig. 11 . ). Postmemory works in just the same way, with its wonderful ability to recreate the past and to ask questions about times long gone from today’s perspective.