Anne Heinlein, Emmanuel Spinelli , Nat Tafelmacher-Magnat, Kaj Duncan David, Portia Winters & Tom Mudd

THE GOLEM OF HEREFORD AND OTHER STORIES

01 April 2016

CURATED BY Nat Tafelmacher-Magnat

The exhibition “The Golem of Hereford and other stories” brings photography, video and sound together in an exploration of extinct localities which makes absence present. “Wüstungen” (Deserted Villages) explores the disappearance of villages and settlements from the former German-German border. By command of the GDR government, over 10 000 people were displaced and forcibly resettled from their villages on the border area. Houses, farms and entire villages were razed.

Anne Heinlein takes photographs of these sites, not looking for any remains however, instead photographing trees, bushes and empty fields. In her black and white large format photographies, she constructs quasi stages to be peopled with visions of the bygone. The work “Wüstungen” is supported by funds from the “Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur” (Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship).

The Golem of Hereford is a generative multichannel audio installation exploring how identity and the past are constantly reshaped and re-imagined through performance, narrative and myth-making. The project began with the search for the remains of a small group of people who lived in Hereford between 1179 and 1290 until they all disappeared, most without trace. Using thousands of interview fragments reorganized in real-time in the installation, alongside field recordings of the various locations where the events allegedly unfolded, the Golem of Hereford talks to us through the mysterious voice of another and reinvents its own history with every listen, constantly shifting from place to place, from subject to subject, from one point of reference to another.