SIGHTINGS 33 – Die KZ und die Gedenkstätte: Replica

The programming for SIGHTINGS has resumed in the cube on the ground floor of the Hall Building.

The projects for the 2021-22 edition of SIGHTINGS will take up the theme of fiction as a place for reality in-the-making. Working within and beyond the premise of the cube, interventions will examine how fictions are constructed and how they take up space, what models of truth and forgetting they carry, and how they produce what is taken for reality. The first project of the series will consist of a photographic installation by the artist Emmanuelle Duret

Die KZ und die Gedenkstätte: Replica I is a reflection on the museification of remembrance sites, in this case, the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. Here, we are presented with one of the camp’s architectural and iconographic elements, the Jourhaus 1 gate, with its infamous (and cynical) inscription: Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work sets you free”). Through photography, archives, text and exhibition design, this project questions the subjective and ethical relationships visitors have with a site so highly charged with loss and destruction. A fragmented reflection on the camp’s visual politics collides with the context of SIGHTINGS and transforms the cube into a site of reproduction, reversal and duplication.

Emmanuelle Duret lives and works in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal. Through an interdisciplinary and conceptual approach, Duret explores the boundaries and links between text, image, space, memory and history while creating a dialogue with photography as a way to bring about historiographic reflections.

Visit the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery website for more information.