I'll Remember April

Anna Boghiguian, Alice Creischer, Eugenio Dittborn, Sophie Gogl, Barbara Hammer, Sandra Brandeis Crawford, Goshka Macuga, Monsieur Zohore

A small exhibition at KOW shows off the strengths of subtler notes. As politics and society are increasingly riven by entrenched antagonisms and reasoned argument is drowned out by simplistic and historically myopic polemics, the exhibition showcases international artists who offer finely nuanced perspectives on the layers of time behind the present, bringing a delicate sensibility to bear on complex histories.

The show is anchored in personal as well as collective experiences of violence whose traces remain ever-present. Alice Creischer (b. Gerolstein, D, 1960) has uncovered and exhibited facets of German and European history that had been left unsaid; the fragility of her forms and materials—usually paper—has always conveyed a sense of how precarious such a practice is. Whether she investigates the continuities linking the postwar German intelligence services to the Nazi era or the mechanics of violence employed by neocolonial economics, Creischer’s art renders her themes with a visual complexity that almost defies comprehension. Eugenio Dittborn (b. 1943 in Santiago de Chile) has been chronicling the emotional and social damage in Chilean society since Pinochet's violent regime.

Barbara Hammer (b. Hollywood, US, 1939) told stories of the diverse experiences of women, especially lesbian women, for whom history had no room. Her 16mm film Pools is a tribute to the pioneering architect Julia Morgan. Her Love Letter (1996) exemplarily visualizes how affection might intertwine the past and the future. Sandra Brandeis Crawford (b. 1955 in London, UK) and Goshka Macugas (b. 1967 in Warsaw) pay tribute to female modern artists who were neglected in their time because of their gender.

Monsieur Zohore’s (b. Potomac, US, 1993) works pile up cultural strata to amalgamate his roots in Côte d’Ivoire, his queer life in the U.S., and the materiality of everyday life. A cycle of drawings by Anna Boghiguian (b. Cairo, 1946) contemplates the self in its relations to museum representation, cultural memory, and nationalism.

In the space between these works: Sophie Gogl’s (b. Kitzbühel, AT, 1992) Suitcases, which have manifestly lost all touch with their intended purpose, the voyage through time and space—they have become home to mushrooms and lichen. Reminiscences of a former owner’s possessions rising from the depths? Or layers of a new existence and timescale beyond the designated mobility?

The artists in the exhibition perform the labor of remembering and translate moments in time and narratives into material reality. Their works bring home to us how protean the present is, how intricate and complicated the engagement with it. Too complicated for the pace and volume of politics and media to do justice to it, as recent experience has made painfully clear. One of art’s merits, we are learning these days, is its indispensable function as a correction: it enriches everything that looks, or is packaged to look, neat and simple by supplying unpleasant complexities. Thank you, dear art!

The exhibition’s title, I’ll Remember April, is borrowed from a jazz classic that was covered by numerous artists. The lyrics muse about how the joys of the past can be preserved in our recollection to become an ever-present source of happiness that transcends the passage of time.

—Alexander Koch