Heiko Krause’s russemblage series, which record residues remaining from the Soviet occupation, are complex images with important links to a variety of discourses. As reminders of a recently concluded chapter in German history, they raise the question of how much to remember, how much to commemorate, and how much to forget, a troubling and complex issue in light of 20th-century German history. At the same time, they are exquisite aesthetic objects, whose subjects and compositions evoke associations with modernist movements from Cubism to Minimalism. In them, Krause skillfully combines the two historical functions of photography: as documentation and as fine art. His personal relationship to his subject, brings to these images a depth and evocative power absent from other photographs of these disappearing sites of habitation and memory.
Michelle Facos (*1955) is professor of the History of Art and adjunct professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she has taught since 1995. She received her Ph.D. in 1989 from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University with a dissertation entitled Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Art of the 1890s. Her recent publications include: Symbolist Art in Context (California, 2008) and An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art (Routledge, 2011). Michelle Facos has received awards from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, Fulbright, and the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.
Einführung und Moderation: Christin Klaus M. A.,
Robert Lehmann M. A.