Criminal Charges
Installation Düsseldorf Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf 2018
During the time of the exhibition in Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, each day a new criminal charge in form of two documents were presented in a display cabinet. All of them are charges of diverse delicts, all details regarding offenders and victims are blackened, therefore it has been only possible to read about the actions without information about the involved protagonists.
Since antique times the practice of damnation memoria exists: names get crossed out (or gouged out) of historical documents and mementos. In ancient Rome it has been common practice to cancel them out in a way that the smutched names were still visible under the cancellation. In modern years the practice changed: It became more common to actually ex- tinguish persons out of their contexts (during Stalinism people have been vanished from photographs; Sigmund Freud tried to protect the legacy of psychoanalysis against associates who threatened to lead it in the wrong direction by carefully covering their tracks in all documents).
The effect of the blackenings in the criminal charges brings the viewers back to their own fantasies. While reading, the actions become vivid by their own fears and past experiences.
Since antique times the practice of damnation memoria exists: names get crossed out (or gouged out) of historical documents and mementos. In ancient Rome it has been common practice to cancel them out in a way that the smutched names were still visible under the cancellation. In modern years the practice changed: It became more common to actually ex- tinguish persons out of their contexts (during Stalinism people have been vanished from photographs; Sigmund Freud tried to protect the legacy of psychoanalysis against associates who threatened to lead it in the wrong direction by carefully covering their tracks in all documents).
The effect of the blackenings in the criminal charges brings the viewers back to their own fantasies. While reading, the actions become vivid by their own fears and past experiences.