Art Metropole

#04835

Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss

Artist

Emily Jacir

Date

2011

Format

Artists' Books

Details

Softcover

ISBN

978-3-7757-2853-9

Size

15 × 21 × 0.3 cm

Length

48 

Number 004 in the series: Documenta 13: 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken (100 Notes – 100 Thoughts)

This notebook combines photographs by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir with a text by political philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, who teaches at the City University of New York, written in response to the images and to conversations with the artist. Jacir’s photographs depict the former Benedictine monastery of Breitenau, near Kassel. A prison camp in the Nazi era, it became a girl’s reformatory after World War II. These images as well as other photographs taken in Kassel are accompanied by selections from the artist’s diary entries, which investigate questions around the histories of the represented sites. Recalling Walter Benjamin’s reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, Buck-Morss’ textual response unravels how truth and collective memory are established and how the inextricable relation between knowledge and power leads to the selection of what is archived and remembered.