Umdrehen
Susanna Marcus Jablonski & Santiago Mostyn
Single-channel 4K video projection with sound (13’47”), printed voile fabric, ceramic stoneware clay, postcards, Ciné-Kodak Eight Model 60 film camera.
Through film, hanging textiles and skeletal ceramic sculptures, Susanna Jablonski and Santiago Mostyn’s installation examines the role of image making in relation to history, looking closely at how images of historical violence, and their appropriation, might shape our understanding of the present day.
Their co-authored film, Umdrehen, juxtaposes audio from the 1981 testimony of a German naval sergeant, Reinhard Wiener – who partially filmed the mass murder of Jewish residents of Liepaja, Latvia in the summer of 1941 – with images recorded by Jablonski and Mostyn at the site of the massacre in 2021. The artists’ camera moves through the landscape in response to Wiener’s description of what he saw that day, taking the viewer into the same forested, coastal landscape and finally to the trench where the atrocities took place.
Characterised as a wartime trophy, Wiener’s archival footage later circulated as evidence in the Holocaust trials and as material for documentary and feature films but remains deliberately not shown here. The artists’ installation questions the function and agency of the camera in describing history, asking how historical events leave traces in landscapes, and how one can approach, retell, or represent a horrific event without reproducing its depiction of violence.
First image by GRAYSC; other images by Helene Torresdotter and Henrik Hellström.
Susanna Marcus Jablonski & Santiago Mostyn
Single-channel 4K video projection with sound (13’47”), printed voile fabric, ceramic stoneware clay, postcards, Ciné-Kodak Eight Model 60 film camera.
Through film, hanging textiles and skeletal ceramic sculptures, Susanna Jablonski and Santiago Mostyn’s installation examines the role of image making in relation to history, looking closely at how images of historical violence, and their appropriation, might shape our understanding of the present day.
Their co-authored film, Umdrehen, juxtaposes audio from the 1981 testimony of a German naval sergeant, Reinhard Wiener – who partially filmed the mass murder of Jewish residents of Liepaja, Latvia in the summer of 1941 – with images recorded by Jablonski and Mostyn at the site of the massacre in 2021. The artists’ camera moves through the landscape in response to Wiener’s description of what he saw that day, taking the viewer into the same forested, coastal landscape and finally to the trench where the atrocities took place.
Characterised as a wartime trophy, Wiener’s archival footage later circulated as evidence in the Holocaust trials and as material for documentary and feature films but remains deliberately not shown here. The artists’ installation questions the function and agency of the camera in describing history, asking how historical events leave traces in landscapes, and how one can approach, retell, or represent a horrific event without reproducing its depiction of violence.
First image by GRAYSC; other images by Helene Torresdotter and Henrik Hellström.