Angelica Baron was born Bogota, Colombia (1985), and is currently based in Weimar, Germany. She graduated from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, with a Diploma – BA Visual Arts with an emphasis in Graphic Expression. She is currently an MFA Candidate in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. In her artistic practice she is interested in an interdisciplinary approach to socio-political transformations, in a humorous, plaintive, skeptical and hopefully serious manner.  She finds in art an effective place to engage with or engender change within broader political, social, and ideological conditions. Since graduating, Baron has exhibited her work in a number of group exhibitions, including;  Festival Ladyfest 4/5 (Cali, 2011. Bogota, 2012), Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación CMPR (Bogota, 2015), 2nd Berliner Herbstsalon, Maxim Gorki Theatre (Berlin, 2015), Kultursymposium Weimar organized by Goethe Institute (Weimar, 2016) Tomorrow We Will Explain* the artistic prologue of »Am Fluss / At the River« initiative by Kunsthaus Dresden (Dresden, 2016). Baron is the co-founder of Lobas Furiosas, an international feminist collective, lately published in the seventh issue of HYSTERIA – Hysterical Feminisms. She was also awarded the DAAD Study Scholarship in the Fields of Fine Art, Design/Visual Communication and Film (October 2015 – October 2017).

Rafaella Constantinou was born in 1991 in Paphos, Cyprus. In 2009-2010 she entered the Technological University of Athens – Department of Conservation of Works of Art. In 2010-2015 she attended the Athens School of Fine Arts, through the IKY Scholarship Foundation, Cyprus. Since 2016 she attends the Master Degree Program in Bauhaus Universität Weimar – Public Art and New Artistic Strategies, through a DAAD Scholarship. She has participated in several group exhibitions, amongst which in 2016; Acts of Engagement Cycle 1, ATHENS BIENNALE AB5TO6 ‘OMONOIA’, Athens; Ex-ils, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; Visual approaches to the poetry of Odysseas Elitis, Zografeio Mandoulides, Istanbul. Rafaella Constantinou’s practice focuses on the scope of art in the public realm through an ongoing relation between the private and the public sphere. The artistic line of Constantinou’s works expands on the perception of space and the relation to it, focusing on ephemeral or permanent artworks in areas of the city and collaborations between fields where art and architecture alternate the limits of practicality and the notion of function.

Performance | Video Installation

“Stone, of course, cannot be destroyed. All one can do is move it around. In any case, it will always outlast the men who use it. For the moment it supports their determination to act.”¹

A pilgrimage between Weimar and the area of Ettersberg in which the artists translocate two rocks taken from the Ilm Park and the Buchenwald forest, respectively. The performance addresses the complex issue of public remembrance and memory making; the video leads to a reflection on the relationship among place, void and commemoration.

In an attempt to relate the city of Weimar with the former concentration camp of Buchenwald, the artists understand the places as territories of exchange that are profoundly linked. They create an in-between space, a heterotopia, by filling up the void of the stones. The in-between space that connects the two territories is an ongoing dialogue; a contact sign that remains unnoticed when experiencing each location separately.

 


1. Camus, Albert, 1970. Lyrical and Critical Essays (Vintage International). Vintage Books ed. Edition. Vintage, pp. 127

Vincent Brière is a Canadian born artist. He uses performance, installation, video and ephemeral projects in public space to explore the factors contributing to social commitment and complacency. His work has been presented at R.I.P.A. Performance [Montreal, 2016], Eastern Bloc [Montreal, 2015], at Encuentro MANIFEST! Choreographing Social Movements in the Americas [Montreal, 2014]. He also took part in art residencies at Vidéographe [Montreal, 2016], Praxis Art Actuel [Sainte-Thérèse, 2011], at the Public Art Mentorship Program of the City of Calgary [Calgary, 2015] and at Conscience Urbaine’s Espace Libre pour la Culture [Montreal, 2015]. Brière has a BA in Studio Arts from Concordia University [2015] and is currently a Master candidate at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in the MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies.

Video Installation

What is the appropriate response to violence and its legacy? How do you surpass feelings of horror, sadness, powerlessness and hatred? If moving on and resilience had a form, what would it look like?

Alongside being a memorial site, Buchenwald is also a place where people live, have families, grow up and grow old. Two former caserns, barracks originally built to house the SS-Totenkopfverbände in charge of running the concentration camp, are now being used as apartment buildings for people to rent. In Home, video images of the former caserns and their surroundings are juxtaposed to an audio interview conducted with a local resident, in which their personal experience and reasons for living in Buchenwald are detailed.

One can be repulsed by the horrors of history and deny them to some extent. Or one can learn the facts and move on while being careful to not repeat them. Life goes on and nothing seems to stop it, not even the most horrifying injustices of Nazi Germany.

Special thank you to interviewees Peter and Christoph, and to Andreas Kühn for German translation.

Vienne Chan was born in Hong Kong (1980), and studied Cultural Studies and Religion at McGill University and Concordia University in Montreal. She began making experimental videos in 2007. In 2012, her practice took a turn into public and socially engaged art, using art as a tool to address problems and to create points of discussions. Her work V’lair (2012) was awarded the Jury prize in video at Besetzt: Diskurse zu Kunst, Politik und Ästhetik at Platform 3 (Munich), and Deutschlands offene Grenzen für UNESCO Welterbe (2016) was awarded a Bauhaus Essentials Prize. Vienne has shown in exhibitions at venues such as Plataforma Revólver (Lisbon), CCA Tel Aviv, Kunsthaus Dresden and the Armory Center (Los Angeles). She is currently an MFA Candidate in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and is a recipient of a Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Scholarship.

Audio Installation

“When I decided to learn to play the cello as an adult, I knew that I would never become a classical concert cellist. Although I do enjoy being able to play a few pieces of Bach every now and then, I know at best I would be an amateur. Listening to all the recordings of cellists, and or even just child cellists on Youtube, this thought becomes more concretised as a fact and not just a feeling.

Facing Buchenwald and the subject of the Holocaust, one of the most heavily discussed events in modern history by some of the greatest thinkers, I only feel speechless and unable. I do not have anything to contribute in any meaningful way.

In this vein, I can only turn towards the personal as a response to the assignment. As an amateur, I will take my cello bow and draw it on a clothes-drying rack.”

After completing a Combined Honors degree in 2010 specialising in contemporary drawing, art history and English literature at Newcastle University, Sophie Foster remained in the city working as a contemporary artist gaining recognition throughout the North East of England. She accomplished her first solo exhibition Transitions: At a Snail’s Pace (2012) with the National Glass Centre in Sunderland, a progression from her ‘living sculpture’ conceived and performed at 25 Stratford Grove in October 2010. In 2013 she was awarded a residency at Northumbria University, working in their paper studio, a unique facility for the research, teaching and scholarship of paper in relation to fine art, conservation and archiving. Since then she has been invited to participate in group shows both locally and internationally including Paper, Table, Wall & After (2015) at The Taiwan National University of Arts, Taipei, a show involving 38 invited artists who utilise the special properties of paper within their work. Sophie Foster’s work focuses on outdoor environments and involves natural, durational process such as light, water and earth. She often gives herself a journey to take with rules to follow, responding to the landscape there and then through experimental mark making, performance and film. She currently studies on the MFA program New Artistic Strategies at Bauhaus Universität, Weimar.

Performance | Photo Installation

Over the years the natural landscape of the quarry site at Buchenwald Memorial has gradually taken over, yet it still holds resonance to the physical labour that was carried out there. As an act of conservation, a site is marked within the quarry area with the intention of digging up the buried pieces of limestone within it. The stones are then cleaned and archived. This act of conservation not only gives these natural objects importance, but pays homage to the archaeological value of digging up the past. Returning all of the stones back to their exact same spot attempts to leave the landscape undisturbed. The idea to preserve the past becomes a contradiction; there has been a clear change in the landscape without actually changing anything. The absurdity of cleaning the stones only to be buried again relates to the Quarry’s initial purpose, an instrument of terror, where the hard, physical labour endured was pointless, humiliating and futile for all that worked there.

Once complete, there is no trace of the physical action, with the only witness being the artist herself. Therefore the audience is requested to build an image of the excavation process through the written and photo documentation presented, very similarly to how past events are perceived within memorials of remembrance.

Kathryn Gohmert [1983, USA] received a bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Texas at Austin before relocating to the UK, and then to china. While based mainly in shanghai from 2008 – 2013, Gohmert worked in a succession of studios and project spaces throughout china that include the former 696 Weihai Lu area [Shanghai], Songzhuang Artist Village [Beijing], and M50 [Shanghai]. Vurrent areas of focus include illustration, painting, performance, installation and mixed media work. Gohmert is currently based in Weimar and Berlin, Germany.

More info on www.kathryngohmert.com

Sounding Sculpture

Geistmaschine is an invention built to amplify both the presence of the viewer and memory, using its own form and mechanics as catalyst.

Constructed primarily of birch wood, this sculpture’s exterior houses a hidden motor. Knocking is initiated by a mechanical arm inside the work when a sensor notes the viewer’s presence.

A machine’s acoustic knocking is programmed to be released at alternating speeds and intervals, only becoming activated when the sensor clearly marks a viewer moving away from its placement in a space.

Touching the viewer’s senses with a lingering feeling of uncertainty about what may or may not have been heard, while in retreat from the seemingly inanimate work, is a means of duplicating a very specific kind of haunting native to our collective, human past: when we allow hard lessons to move from our periphery, we most need their reminders.

Anke Hannemann (*1980, GDR/Germany) Studied English Literature and Art History at Technical University Dresden, Conceptual Art at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Sound and Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was trained in the restoration of mural paintings and leaf gilding at the restoration workshop Gunter Preuss, Meißen. Her artistic work includes installation and site-specific intervention, video, performance and sound. She is currently doing her Ph.D. in Fine Arts dealing with the topic “The artist and the reconstruction of identity – On the trauma of architectural deconstruction (after the end of the GDR)”. Besides her artistic practice, Hannemann works as an independent curator and teaches at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in the MFA-program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies”. Lives and works in Leipzig and Weimar.

Transcribed Choreography

If one could
imagine
the unthinkable
at a place of concrete islands
as these
lost rhymes are cast in-situ
where, yet
everything might be conceivable –
an empty stage
as something
where an empty space
once would
transform illusions into songs
for just another one –
were fielded thin
in oneiric orchards
when then
a dance could blank those sediments
that quarrel in rhythm
awaiting such haptic habits
as underlining the ritual
of something
we could not imagine
still

Based on the pace and routine of Buchenwald’s Memorial cleaning staff, the artist tries to understand their part in maintaining the place as a dance, creating a choreography for them.

Feng Runze is an artist from China, born in 1990. Feng earned a Bachelor Degree in Industrial Design GDUT (Guangzhou, China) in 2013. Subsequently he worked as a container architect and product manager in Shenzhen for 3 years, working in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Foshan, with jobs ranged from product design to container architecture, from marketing to product manager. These diversified occupational experiences gave him a lot of chances and inspirations to combine different fields together to create something new. His art works mainly discuss the dynamic relationship between people and space, meanwhile, exploring the perfect union of art and technology. He tries to make public art more functional, beyond the impact of aesthetics. Currently, he is pursing an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar.

Yihui Liu is a visual artist, designer and illustrator, born in 1990 in China. She finished her Bachelor degree in Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts and Master degree in Communication University of China. Currently she is living and studying in Germany for her second Master program in Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Since 2008 Liu Yihui’s practice has involved computer painting, combines painting, Chinese calligraphy, Ukiyo-e (Traditional Japanese prints and paintings), film art, and stage design. In 2013, she worked for a Chinese internet company Baidu as visual designer and illustrator for two years, then she began to use more technological ways to create and show art. In 2015, she finished her own Illustration book and online APP, THE LITTLE PRINCE.

Sounding Scultpure | Video Installation

“Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.“ 

– The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Spieldose is a wooden box (100 cm * 100 cm * 120 cm) with a crude xylophone mechanism installed inside. When a viewer turns the handle, beaters will randomly hit different parts of the xylophone, creating a mechanical, ringing sound that may be linked to childhood memories of a musicbox. Yet the roughness of the sound makes it a present experience and thereby connects past and present, personal memory and history.

Spieldose is installed inside the forest nearby the former concentration camp of Buchenwald. When the audience stands in the forest, they may hear birds and other animals calling and moving, the wind swaying the trees and leaves, while also being able to reflect on the past of the former camp. The moment the audience becomes active and decides to play the box, the ringing, comfort and mechanical tones will connect with its acoustic environment, the sound of the forrest and the people visiting.

Spieldose is dedicated as a commemoration to the victims of Buchenwald.

Matthew Lloyd was born in Cheshire UK, (1988) and is based in Liverpool UK, and Weimar Germany. Since graduating from The Liverpool John Moores Art and Design Academy, with a BA (Hons) Graphic Arts: Illustration, (2010), the artist has exhibited his work in a number group shows including: Liverpool Art Now Part 1, The Bohemia Space (Liverpool 2011), Passion For Freedom 7, Unit 24 Gallery, (London), and HOT-ONE-HUNDRED Artist in the UK, Schwartz Gallery (London 2013). Solo shows include: I Don’t Believe In…, The Bluecoat Gallery (Liverpool Biennial 2010), Something Nothing Nothing Something / A Manifesto I, Fallout Factory Gallery (Liverpool Biennial 2012). Matthew Lloyd was also awarded the GlogauAIR Berlin Art Residency, (December 2013 – June 2014) where the artist presented his first public work {I} Billboard Installation, Glogauaer Strasse (Berlin 2014).

Video Installation

“Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?”

– Jean-Paul Sartre, Morts Sans Sepulture ¹

In his highly-criticized famous dictum, Adorno’s claim to ‘write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,’ was not meant to prevent writers and artists from reacting to the inconceivableness of the Holocaust, but to understand its limitations in the act of its representation. Adorno, along with Lyotard, had concerns of how can something, as a response, be able to represent such a traumatic event, when the event itself has rendered the properties and tools for it to be represented, useless.

It becomes in this important uselessness where the video installation, You Cannot Hear I? (Buchenwald, Forest) is to recognize not only the prohibition, and complexities of representing what is truly unrepresentable, but also that of the survivors of the Holocaust. To the point where the artist can translate, because of the lack of an understanding of their testimony, has even made their own survival, into a unique degree of worthlessness, and how their own voices have to remain stuck in their throats.

Filmed between the former camp and city of Weimar, the video is to become a purgatorial act. Where the artist claims, that the evaluation of the Holocaust has rendered it into a religious narrative, an unattainable thing, a void no mortal is able to reach or comprehend. Between these two worlds, the artist presents himself within the manipulated forest, reminiscent that of a gatekeeper, offering a particular song that has to be ‘listened’ before anyone might wish to approach this unimaginable event, while covertly asking ‘if one can joke, can one cope?’

1. Quote from Theodor Adorno essay ‘Commitment’ (London: Verso 1977) PP 188-9

Nasir Malekijoo, born in 1984 in Tehran, Iran, is a graduate of “drama studies”. After graduation, he started to create a variety of plays with an eclectic approach towards “experimental theater” and “European theater”. As a writer, director, set and costume designer and actor, he tries to portray a unified monolithic world that is defined and developed by his own individual mindset. He has been seriously and professionally involved in the Iranian theater industry since 2006. His tendency to visual arts has made him inclined to a particular type of dramatic art which is called “visual theater”. His main mindset in drama, as he himself calls it, is “theater as a cartoon”. He regards bitter satire (grotesque) as one of the most prominent elements of his works and tries to portray the stereotyped anomalies in human life in an exaggerated way. He is currently pursuing an MFA in the field of “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimer, Germany.

Video Installation

For the artist, blocking the ear is a symbol of silence. A requiem for silence consists of a sculpture of painted clay and dripping bee wax captured in a video performance. With this video work, the artist is seeking a footprint of innocent people who were imprisoned in Buchenwald between the years 1937 and 1945, imagining their suppression and their common tragedy in the concentration camp.

Dropping wax onto an ear is an icon of physical forcefulness which was imposed onto them as prisoners under barbaric and starving conditions and torture. A requiem for silence is supposed to remind the spectators of the destinies of the victims of the further concentration camp.

The artist’s effort is to visualize the auditory aspects of sound in a poetic ambience.

Mila Panić born in 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina currently lives between Weimar, Germany and Banja Luka, BiH. In 2014 she graduated from Academy of Arts in the University of Banja Luka, Department of Painting. In 2013 she attended the International Summer Academy in Salzburg, in the course “Arte Util” taught by artist Tania Bruguera. As a DAAD scholarship holder, in 2015 she enrolled in the master degree program of Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, which she currently attends. In 2014 she co-founded ‘APARTMAN’ art project for the popularisation of contemporary art in BiH.

Mila Panić is the winner of several scholarships and grants as well as the Award for best student work in the field of visual art, awarded by the Museum of Contemporary art of Republic of Srpska in 2014. She was shortlisted for ZVONO Art Award for the best young artist in 2014 in BiH and 6.namaTREba.biennale – Share too much History, more Future! award for the best young video artist in BiH. Her works were presented in numbers of regional and international exhibitions, biennales, festivals and presentations including: 25th Slavonski Biennale, Museum of Visual Art (Osijek, CRO, 2017); 14×14 Donumenta, MSURS, (Banja Luka, BiH, 2016); ‘Contemporary Thesaurus’, Museum of Contemporary art of Vojvodina (Novi Sad,Serbia, 2016); 2. Berliner Herbstsalon, Imaginary Bauhaus Museum, Maxim Gorki Theater (Berlin, Germany, 2015); Paraflows. X DIGITAL MIGRATION, Kunstlerhaus (Wien, Austria,2015); ‘How we quit the forest’, Sala LaMetro, during INCUBARTE festival (Valencia, Spain,2015); XI Biennale for Young artists, organised by national Museum of Con- temporary Art (Skoplje.Macedonia,2014), etc.

Video Installation

The artist questions different statements which could be made and what is one’s responsibility as an artist and as an observer while dealing with the space of Buchenwald Memorial through the simple act of lighting a cigarette within this space and its vast history.

On this special site a daily and simple action is not as easily understood nor naive.

YunJu Park is a South Korean Artist and Writer. She has participated in Artist Residency programs in ZK/U Berlin (2016); Incheon Art platform, Korea (2016); Jaio Contemporary Art, Japan, (2013); Triangle Art Association, New York (2010); Ssamzie Nongbu Art Company, Korea (2009). Solo Exhibitions include: Incheon Art Platform, Korea (2016); Space Can Foundation, Seoul, Korea (2015); Your Action Is Prohibited, Arts Pace Hotel, Boan, Seoul (2014); Gallery Biim, Seoul (2012), first exhibition Sponsored by Seoul National Museum of Art (2011).

2-Channel Video Installation

‘Impossibility’ as an interpretation of silence, becomes the performative focus for the artist work. From small and quiet to heavy and loud, certain objects are trying to reach the sky, and overcome the horizon of the ‘impossibility’ within dual acts of throwing and falling.

These acts, the artist considers, could be related to political and or historical statements. As within the physical movements of the performance: directivity is to become important, and is shown within the contrast between artificial intention and natural results. Where the purpose of trying to throw objects into the sky, may demonstrate the striving for freedom and justice against oppressing power.

The artist claims, “when objects fall to the ground they make a sound, if throwing the object means expressing an opinion, the loudness can be correlated with strength and aggression. We are impossibly hopeful sometimes, even though all attempts work on a level of ‘impossibility’, one must sometimes have to do something, in order to raise one’s voice for justice and human rights. For, ‘impossibility’ becomes an option when it reaches into those of the hopelessness. The ‘impossibility’ takes the role within the silence, and the continual actions of the visual, within this performance.”

Mariya Pavlenko is a Ukrainian artist and designer, based in Kyiv, Wroclaw and Weimar. Mariya graduated from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv, Ukraine, and is currently a student of the international program “Art in Public Space and New Artistic Strategies” at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Mariya Pavlenko works with reconstruction of collective memory through personal experience, taking this as a strategy that confronts ideological usage of artistic practices in neo-liberal society. Her works deal with such topics as aesthetics of modernity, history of her homeland and tension between religion and economy. She set up a number of personal shows in Kyiv, Ukraine, as well as participated in group exhibitions worldwide, among which “Tomorrow we will explain”, public space/Kunsthaus Dresden; “The School of Kyiv” Bienniale, Kyiv, Ukraine; “Revolution of dignity”, Wilson Center, Washington, USA; Art Kyiv Contemporary IX, Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, Ukraine; “Long way to the freedom”, Ukrainian Institute of Contemporary Art in Chicago, USA; “I’m a drop in the ocean”, MOCAK, Krakow, Poland, and Künstlerhaus, Wien, Austria; “Civil mysticism”, Modern Art Research Institute, Kyiv, Ukraine.

Audio Guide

What do we know about the things that we have never experienced?

Reflecting on ideas of Walter Benjamin about the language of things¹, as well as well Fredric Jameson’s concept of time’s present², Вирва³-Klangmal collects remains of the original place (including beech wood, relief of the place and climate features) that visitors of the former concentration camp, Buchenwald, can find today in the same condition, and for this reason in the same way experience. Focused on experiencing of natural and social phenomena, as well as traces of original objects that can be recognized as renovated, the audio guide provides an alternative journey through locations of sound memorial that are not appropriated by the history of the place.

Songs: Basement, Borders, Fear, Pressure, Wood, Stone in my Shoe, Pohovannya (Поховання), Green Tree with Green Bird House, Rituals, Warmth, Sea, Incline, Stones, Wind, Colder, Frozen, Vyrva (Вирва), Grass.

 
1. Walter Benjamin, 1916, Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen, ein Lesebuch, Suhrkampverlag
2. Fredric Jameson, 2012, The Aesthetics of Singularity: Time and Event in Postmodernity, Georg Forster Lecture
3. Вирва (Ukrainian) – pit, hole, ripped out by stroke or explosion, in the ground but also in a bottom of a river

Born in Quito-Ecuador in 1991, Denise Rosero Bermúdez is an architect, designer and artist currently based in Germany. In 2009 she entered the Architecture and Design College in Universidad San Francisco de Quito. She achieved her title in architecture in 2014 and has been practicing professionally ever since. Her experience in the field includes architectural and interior design in small and large scales, conservation and heritage, construction and (most importantly) public urban projects for social and urban development. In 2012 she participated in the XVIII Panamerican Biennale of Architecture in Quito-Ecuador, themed “Necessary Architecture, Necessary Cities”. In 2013 she attended the International Workshop from Universidad de los Andes in Cartagena – Colombia, themed “Heritage in a Consolidated City”; in which she and her team gained an honorable mention for their project and were nominated for Best Social Awareness Video. In 2014 she presented her Architectural Thesis: “Recovery and Appropriation of Public Space as a Consolidator of Communities: Production and Commerce Center for Sangolquí-Ecuador” in which nontraditional urban practices focus on societies and the common spaces they inhabit; clearly showing the investigation area she leans towards. In 2016 she began her MFA degree in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from Bauhaus Universität-Weimar. Currently developing a Site Specific Sound Installation entitled “Echoes of Buchenwald”.

Site-Specific Audio Installation

The murmurs of the past will echo constantly in our memories, like an infinite song encountering our thoughts and reminding us of the fragility of human nature. The longing witness that is the city of Weimar, could attest to the unspoken stories that have occurred, and – as ghosts – refresh our memories of the foregone. Beneath the surface of the present and the noise of the passing time, we might hear the whispers of those who walked our paths before us and soundlessly learn from their words.

We shall pay close attention to the vast memories of the cities, because there is no entity that can link us closer to the past. And if, by walking through our mundane activities, we were to perceive the compositions of memories sounding loudly in our minds, we should listen closely and try to understand. Because our silent witnesses are loudly humming, they have eternal memory and they want us to never forget. Appraise the echo, grasp it intently; because history has painted the city with its melody.

Malak Yacout is an Egyptian artist, currently studying in the Public Art and New Artistic Strategies M.F.A at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She graduated in 2015 from the American University in Cairo, having conducted exchange semesters at Bard College and at Parsons at the New School, New York. In 2015-16, Yacout spent a year working as a researcher at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. She has participated in group exhibitions at AUC’s Sharjah Gallery, the Greek Campus, the Peacock Art Gallery and Medrar, where her work, A Priori Markings, has won two Roznama art prizes. Malak Yacout’s work shows interest in issues of time, semiotics, structuralism, and epistemology. She is currently exploring names, language and meaning in the context of the former Buchenwald Concentration Camp.

Site-specific Public Art Installation

The misleading name “Häftlingskantine” (“Prisoners’ Canteen”) does not invoke experiences of actual Buchenwald prisoners desperately fighting for scraps of nutrition. Neither does “Sonderbau” (“Special Building”) reflect its intended purpose in the former Buchenwald concentration camp. The same applies to “Buchenwald”, “Hospital”, “Kleines Lager” (“Little Camp”): the names fail to represent their meanings. Yet, do even labels like “Holocaust” or “Blutstrasse” (“Blood Road”) truly reflect the meanings they supposedly signify? What alternative names might have been more appropriate? Is it even possible to represent meaning through language at all?

Untitled, a site-specific public art installation, makes the observation that language seems to carry a weight beyond simple representation. If language does not only signify but also adds meaning, then how do these additions shape and reconstruct our knowledge? Is knowledge derived only from observable, rational truth or is it also shaped by language?

In a survey conducted in the streets of Weimar, passers-by try to rename the former Buchenwald Concentration Camp and its spaces. The sounds of these alternative names are clearly and interruptingly substituted into original radio excerpts about Buchenwald. Displayed in Weimar’s newspaper building vitrines, copies of original newspapers are manipulated to replace and cover names of Buchenwald and its spaces with handwritten names. Documentation is displayed at the Buchenwald Memorial.

Saša Tatić was born 1991 in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and graduated from the Academy of Arts at the University of Banja Luka in 2014. Currently she is attending MFA studies at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, in the Department of Public Art and New Artistic Strategies as a DAAD Scholarship holder. Tatić is one of the co-founders of the art project for popularization of contemporary art “APARTMAN”. She is the winner of several awards and praises in the field of visual arts, including the jury award at the ‘’60 seconds’’ Film Festival in Copenhagen. In 2013, Tatić was a finalist of “Henkel Art.Award”. She has been actively exhibiting since 2013 in numerous regional and international exhibitions and festivals. 

Performative action

The gate of the former concentration camp Buchenwald, faced towards the inside, bears the inscription “Jedem das Seine”. Through planned performative action the gate should have been taken off the hinges and rotated in a way that the inscription changes its facing and becomes properly readable from the side when entering the camp. Turning the position of the inscription would have placed it into a different context, which would provide a new interpretation of reading the proverb. The maxim, that should stand as a simple and memorable guide for living, would fulfill its meaning by serving as a reminder faced to the free side of the former camp.

As a substitute for the planned two channel video documentation of the action, manipulated photographs display the replacement of the inscription of the gate, including sights from in- and outside, in a way that an observer can visualize and distinguish the difference of meaning accomplished by creating a new context of observation.

Ina Weise was born in 1985 in Dresden, Germany. She studied Design at the Academy of Applied Arts in Schneeberg, Germany. After extended periods abroad in Linz, Austria, Łódź, Poland and in Chicago, US she graduated with a Masters degree in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in 2014. Her works include site-specific performances and temporary interventions in public space. Weise is co-founder of the artist collective FREIZEIT (freizeit.work) and board member of the open workshop ROSENWERK of Konglomerat e.V. (konglomerat.org). She is currently working as artistic assistant of the international MFA-Program “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

More info on inaweise.com

Installation

The conservation and subsequent scientific examination of archaeological objects helps us to further understand our shared histories. Objects entrusted to conservationists are primarily selected based on their scientific or cultural-historical significance, leaving behind troves of unexpected, and uninspected, objects that are parts of our common environment. These banal entities might be regarded as rubbish, standing for excess, laziness, or nerves, or they might hold in their material, silent human imprints, acting as emotional storage bins.

The artist presents a piece of (chewed) chewing gum for scientific consideration. It will be subject to a thorough examination and presented in an archival display. The proposition is that chewing gum can be reimagined as an energetic fossil, in which physical traces of the act of mastication, as well as the immaterial traces of the chewing human’s emotional life, are inscribed.

Consider the Chewing Gum shows the limits of science in decoding complex human emotions and offers a new way to explore the emotional imprints that linger in our everyday practices and the objects associated with them.

Joephy Sze Ting Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1989. She obtained her BA from the Academy of Visual Arts in Hong Kong Baptist University in 2012. Currently she is pursuing her MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She works with diverse media, including site-specific installation, public art and painting. Wong uses installation as a condition to experiment with people and locations charged with memories. She challenges the definition of space and encourages uncertainties and unpredictable happenings in her installations. Her exhibitions include: Hack Project, Oil Street Art Space, Hong Kong (2016); Ghost Walk, Fringe Club, Hong Kong (2015)
; Find Arts Exhibition, 2014-PMQ, Hong Kong (2014); Make a different, MaD@ Social Innovation tour, Seoul, Korea (2013); Kowloon City Book Festival, MaD@九龍城書節 
(2012); Hawkerama, DeTour, Hong Kong (2012)
; Market Forces, Osage Gallery, Hong Kong (2012); Aus eins . zwei ende, Mesa Wong & Joephy Wong Joint Exhibition, AVA Gallery, Hong Kong (2011)

Sounding Installation

No matter how hard we try to dig out the closest possible correspondence to what actually happened, it seems that the story of the truth changes and is shaped over time. History is a story about the past and we who tell or write it, as well as we who hear or read it, lose parts of narration in between. To uncover the truth in historical documentations, surviving witnesses are typically presented in an interview situation.

In An Interview the artist borrows interview questions of the documentary movie Shoah, in which director Claude Lanzmann recounts the story of the Holocaust through interviews with witnesses, perpetrators and survivors, to interview beer bottles of the brands “Deinhardt” and “Ehringsdorfer”, which were supplied to the SS in Buchenwald during the Second World War and still exist in Weimar nowadays.

The interviews were recorded in different places within Weimar city and are presented in an installation in which sound is emerging from the finished beer bottles.

Yi Weihua is visual artist and designer from China, born in 1986. She graduated from Tianjin Academic of Fine Art [TAFA] — Public Art Faculty with Bachelor Degree in 2009. In 2012-2016 Yi worked as Design Lead at UrbanArtProject(UAP), Shanghai, an Australian company which specializes in Public Art. Currently she is studying in the MFA program Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Yi’s works is an ongoing investigation into the boundaries of Public Art and its identities. Her art practice uses reduplicative elements and encourages interactive participation. She believes local urbanism heritage is an essential foundation for art in public space, aiming to create public art which generates new common memories for its audiences. He exhibitions include: “Region” Public Art, Tishman office, Shanghai, China, and “Emerge” Public Art, Westin Hotel, Hainan, China in 2014; “Pearl” Public Art, Camphorwood Residence, Wuxi, China in 2012; “Made by Volkswagen“ Exhibition, Beijing, China, and “Twelve Facies” Johnnie Walker Exhibition, Beijing, China in 2011, Published in “Vision” Magazine 04/2011; and INBAR Shanghai Expo Exhibition, Shanghai, China in 2010.

Installation

Grass flourishes on the muster-ground of the former concentration camp of Buchenwald. And the site of the tragedy has now become an ambience for tourist photos and sometimes artistic expression. We try to understand the history of the Holocaust from all kinds of sources and we hear and imagine, research and study about this heavy, highlighted part of history. But what is the real intention of doing this? What can we change or influence?

Welcome to Join the Parade is an art installation with a symbolic gateway and an array of screens with a spotlight placed in front that illuminates the installation and might project shadows of spectators on each screen if they decide to stand on a specific spot. Through such an interaction, the perception of the screens might shift from still objects to a living march towards the gateway. Through audience participation this art work questions the perspectives when people face history nowadays.

Is it a march to a destination, is the gateway an entry or an exit? Are we as an audience onlookers or part of the parade?