Dhe exhibition of the hour is quiet. In Studio West, a project space at the Kunsthalle Darmstadt, the curator team consisting of Miriam Schmidt, Kai Altheim and Jonas Höschl is showing nine young positions that struggle to find a contemporary artistic approach to the culture of remembrance that has come under pressure, without ignoring social faults such as racism or homophobia to lose sight. The artists represented in the exhibition succeed in implementing the topic now in focus in a differentiated, reflective and at the same time aesthetically convincing manner.
There is Abie Franklin’s video installation “Gniza”. The artist, who was born in Jerusalem in 1995 and has lived in Berlin since 2015, focuses on the fate of the book as a physical object: a “body,” so to speak, that can be dipped in ice water and buried in the ground, but also burned. We see how the artist exposes books to the elements of earth and water, accompanied by historical photographs of the book burning on Berlin’s Bebelplatz and Micha Ullman’s monument erected there in memory of this politically motivated act of violence. Above all, Franklin describes a visit to his late grandfather’s extensive private library, which also contained Hebrew editions of German-language literary classics.
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