turning my gaze inward
Reading-Room for four poems from Female Image by Gertrud Kolmar
09. - 31. October 2010
wortwedding - Prinzenallee 59 - 13159 Berlin
Concept & Installation
Nicola Caroli
Photography & Installation
Joanna Kane
Recorded Voice
Barbara Dahlinger
Sound Editing
Marie Chartron
Graphics
Johanna Sasse
Graphic Design
Johanna Sasse
Thanks to
Judith Gaida, Ariadne Ghabel, Catherine Launay, Remo V. Lotano, Vanessa Mildenberg, Jörg Richter und Jeanette Sendler.
"The vibrancy of Kolmar's poetry comes from an urgent need to express and transform her sense of isolation.
In her poems and cycles of poems she creates an inner space where she can expand and re-invent herself. This inner space is the antithesis of her environment: the rejection from her mother, a patriarchial, bourgoise upbringing, an unhappy and shameful love affair and the threat of rising national socialism.
In turning my gaze inward I want to provide a physical space to Kolmar's sensibility and for the visitor a tangible sense of her world."
Nicola Caroli
"The paradox of responding to Kolmar's work for a visual artist, is that although much of Kolmar's work is intensely colourful, and visually evocative and seductive, the very intensity of the visual language renders the visual redundant.
In the Fourth Space, the elements of photography are stripped down to the basics of light and shadow. The focal element is an opaque mirror with projected images suggesting light, movement and the shadow of foliage. The mirror subverts the expectations of a mirror as reflecting frame for the self and as window to look outwards beyond the self, forcing the gaze within. The images projected on the mirror reference Kolmar's lost paradise of Finkelkrug, the wealthy suburb west of Berlin, which was her home until the family's eviction in 1938."
Joanna Kane
Nicola Caroli is poetry mediator. Her two studies - acting training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Poetry first came together in 1998 with a staging of a poetry performance. She's been creating spaces for poetry ever since, mainly in the form of performance until 2008 under the name of emerging properties. Since 2009 she co-organises the poetry festival Printemps des Poetes, Berlin and is artistic director of wortwedding - space for poetry projects. She also mediates poetry at schools.
www.nicolacaroli.com
Joanna Kane is a visual artist, based in Edinburgh working with photography, video and digital media. In her work she often combines traditional or historically inspired photographic approaches with digital techniques. Her latest photographic project The Somnambulists, photographs of a series of life masks, was shown at the Hayward Gallery as part of the group exhibition The Russian Linesman, curated by Mark Wallinger (2009), in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (2008), and at the European Month of Photography in Bratislava (2007).
www.joannakane.co.uk
Gertrud Kolmar was born in Berlin in 1894 as the eldest daughter of a Jewish lawyer. She learnt several languages and worked during the First World War as a translator, later as a teacher and governess. When her mother died, she took over the household and became her father's personal assistant. She published numerous poems in newspapers and anthologies but stayed away from the literary circles. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Gertrud Kolmar and her father were the only members of the family who decided to stay in Germany . In 1938 they were expropriated and sent to a "Jew House" in Berlin Schöneberg. In 1941 Gertrud Kolmar was recruited for slave labour in an arms factory and in 1943 she was murdered in Auschwitz.
Vernissage 9. Oct. 7pm
Opening times: Friday - Sunday 2 - 6pm
10., 15., 16., 17., 22., 23., 24., 29., 30., 31.10.
29.10. additionally from 7 - 10pm
work in progress showings
February 2008, Festival 100° Berlin
September 2007, Schwelle 7
"I could not read the poems so well (I'm not German), but I think the fact that you are undressing yourself before
getting in works very strong.
You could be me.
I could be you.
I leave something behind in order to reach you.
I leave myself or better "my outside-self" in the other room.
I could have been there very long and at the same time you want to leave.
You feel a little bit different when you come out. Thanks."
Janice, February 2008.