Exploring Remembrance and Forgetting
What happens to people, stories, and artifacts without other people to see, appreciate, and preserve them… nothing? The exhibition DER AUFTAKT (The Beginning) explores this boundary—the line between forgetting and remembering—and presents different artistic positions that place remembrance, or the call for engagement with these issues, at the centre of their work.
The exhibition not only presents different perspectives across the spectrum of art and activism but also introduces the members of the association Women in Remembrance Culture e.V. (WIRC), newly founded in 2025.
Women in Remembrance Culture
The association Women in Remembrance Culture brings together women working in the arts and academia to make specifically female perspectives visible and to anchor them in German and international cultures of remembrance. In the past, female perspectives in German and international cultures of remembrance have either not been considered or documented at all, or have not been sufficiently represented—and certainly not in a way that even begins to reflect gender parity. For this reason, the culture of remembrance has thus far been shaped by purely or predominantly male perspectives. Through national and international artistic projects, the association aims to remedy this situation and thereby contribute to a truly gender-inclusive and balanced culture of remembrance.
About the Exhibition
Natalia Bougai
Natalia Bougai, a visual artist, explores her father’s photographic archive. As an amateur photographer, he documented the family’s life. Developing the photos together played a special role for all family members. Many years later, Bougai asked her family to describe these shared moments. The memories they shared form the basis for her artistic work The Red Evening—a performative sound-and-space installation with video. These intimate insights extend beyond the private sphere, creating a panorama of the life of a Russian-Ukrainian family from the past to the present.
Susan Donath
Susan Donath, a visual artist, noticed that the former synagogue in Ústí nad Labem (Czech Republic) rarely appears as a subject on postcards and in photographs. She began searching for postcards featuring the synagogue either as the sole subject or as part of cityscapes. At the same time, she collected material from Dresden, Görlitz, and Teplice. She realised that depictions of synagogues on postcards are often the only remaining visual records of these synagogues today. To make the collected visual material accessible, she published it on the website in 2023: https://www.xn--die-bilder-kommen-zurck-wpc.com/
Valérie Madoka Naito
Valérie Madoka Naito, an architect and documentary filmmaker, accompanied artist Susan Donath to Střekov Cemetery in Ústí nad Labem in 2023 to document the visit on film. Filmed up close, Donath is seen tending to the only grave bearing a German-Czech inscription, a task she has undertaken since 2008. Donath recounts touching encounters with passers-by and shares the findings of her research, which span from royalist Europe to the expulsion of the German minority after World War II. https://naito.eu/
Heike Richter
Heike Richter, an activist in the field of cemetery culture, explicitly advocates for the preservation of “overlooked” gravestones. Every gravestone reflects a person’s story and has the potential to become a memorial. Once the lease on a burial plot expires, the gravestones disappear—and with them, often the last record of a person’s life. Preserving gravestones allows us to remember people and their stories.
The gravestone of Eugen Kornblum, located at the Innerer Matthäusfriedhof in Dresden, belongs to a Jewish merchant who survived in a “Judenhaus” until 1945 but was unable to flee during the bombing raid on the night of 13 February 1945.
