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- Lest we forget
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- What is memory
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- Unspeakable
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- Sometimes the child is silenced by violence or by a direct threat of murder – 8 x 11 feet
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- We need to understand the past in order to reclaim the present and the future – 8′ x 11′
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- She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy safety in a situation that is unsafe control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable power in a si
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- What I should have said
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- To speak is to invite the stigma that attaches to victims
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- Atrocities refuse to be buried
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- Allgegenwart der Macht (Omnipresence of Power)
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- The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness
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- The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma
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- Die Machtbeziehungen sind gleichzeitig intentional und nicht subjektiv
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- Die machtbeziehungen sind gleichzeitig intentional und nicht subjektiv
Ira hoffecker
Artist Statement for my MFA
I am interested in how Germans deal with collective memory, with suppressing and forgetting the past as opposed to remembering and striving to come to terms with the past.
Formerly my work critically examined and analyzed the different identities that places like Berlin can take on over time within paintings. With this new body of work, I scrutinized German collective memory, investigated power structures and the overstepping of personal boundaries. I combined ideas pertaining to homeland and my own personal memory. This body of work consists of paintings, drawings and the video History as Personal Memory.
In my video, I introduced working with my body to see if I could use it as a tool of investigation. My voice recites text by Nietzsche, Foucault and my own writings that I included as a voice-over to the imagery. My hand is captured working on a painting. I poured tar onto the canvas and rubbed it into the surface. In one scene, I walked on train tracks. I projected my grandfather’s portrait onto my body. I am interested in how I can utilize my body as a tool to reactivate memory. Video allowed my body to implement the dialogue of my story, perform the story. Exploration through the body work presented gave immediacy to the probing questions I assessed. I wanted to see my film and my painting work together as a tool of investigation into my memory. The experiences of my past shaped and formed me as the human being I am today, the experience that can be seen as living practice in the memory of my self-constructed identity.
I investigated Foucault’s ideas concerning a variety of power structure models, which contributes to the dialogue my work embodies. I am interested in how people can usurp power and impose power over others. I explored the rationale associated with people who are not necessarily in a position of power but who enable those in that role by assisting them. I was also interested in power structures inherent in the church and the power certain individuals have over others. I was interested in finding out about the psychological consequences of those who had been overpowered by others and what happens when a child’s boundaries are compromised, reflecting on my experience of childhood sexual abuse.
With my hands, I applied tar to the surfaces of canvas. The tar is dark black and I am attracted to the viscosity of this medium. Tar was the first medium I used when I started painting many years ago. I used tar when I also melted lead and poured it on metal. Lead is of major importance in Germanic mythology. I did not use lead in the new work, but its association with tar in my process development seemed to be enough. Working with tar helped me reflect on what it means to be German.
It was important to me to take heed of the recommendation of my professors to ‘own’ my work. I interpreted their suggestions to mean that my work practice would benefit from the incorporation of personal aspects of my own life, creating greater vitality and valitiy to the process and project. These personal revelations, a critical examination of my understanding of the world, and my self-perception developed through formative experiences would advance my ideas and working processes. After all the videos I had created during my first year of my MFA, I was encouraged to tell the story that only I can tell. I needed to give myself the time and space for intense reflection and investigation through my art practise, to see if I can work through the torment of residual memories which persist in inflicting anguish upon me. Recurring hateful, rejected memories assert themselves at inexplicable times.
Correlations between my childhood abuse which I endeavor to forget and the history of Germany, which many Germans are trying to erase from their memories exist in the film. Within my experience of being German, I have observed Germans deal with our collective memory by censoring and ignoring the consequence of our complex warring past rather than being vigilant, continually committed to knowledge, deliberate, recognise and concede our adverse history. In my film, I tore pages from a history book about the Third Reich, a time in Germany’s history that many Germans would prefer to eradicate from memory. Many Germans of my generation would like to expunge this part of our history and to put a leaden blanket onto the past. Yet, it is important to face and to discuss this past, to show how it was possible for the Nazis to come to power, in order to prevent its imposed trauma and desecration from ever happening again. Consistent dialogue will help prevent a repetition of their oppression and atrocities.
This work references my childhood memories of trauma that I attempted to forget for so many years – without success. Through research and the making of History as Personal Memory, I have learned that only by consciously working through memories, writing them down, finally articulating them in my work, can my healing start to take place.
My film Meanwhile in LaLaLand was a nominee for Best Documentary at the Back in the Box Competition in Los Angeles and was chosen for the official selection at the Manchester Film Festival 2018 and nominated as best documentary at the Black Box Film Festival
My film History as Personal Memory was chosen for the official selection in reserve of the German United Film Festival in Berlin 2018.
History as Personal Memory
History as Personal Memory video with English voice-over.
Length: 8:51 min
I am interested in how Germans deal with collective memory, with suppressing and forgetting the past as opposed to remembering and striving to come to terms with the past. Formerly my work critically examined and analyzed the different identities that places like Berlin can take on
over time within paintings. With this new body of work, I scrutinized German collective
memory, investigated power structures and the overstepping of personal boundaries. I combined ideas pertaining to homeland and my own personal memory. This body of work consists of paintings, drawings and the video History as Personal Memory.
This work references my childhood memories of trauma and sexual abuse through my
grandfather that I attempted to forget for so many years – without success. Through research and the making of History as Personal Memory, I have learned that not only by consciously working through memories, writing them down, finally articulating them in my work, can my healing start to take place.
In my video, I introduced working with my body to see if I could use it as a tool of investigation.
My voice recites text by Nietzsche, Foucault and my own writings that I included as a voice-over to the imagery. My hand is captured working on a painting. I poured tar onto the canvas and rubbed it into the surface. In one scene, I walked on train tracks. I projected my grandfather's
portrait onto my body. I am interested in how I can utilize my body as a tool to reactivate
memory. Video allowed my body to implement the dialogue of my story, perform the story.
I investigated Foucault’s ideas concerning a variety of power structure models, which
contributes to the dialogue my work embodies. I am interested in how people can usurp power and impose power over others. I was interested in finding out about the psychological consequences of those who had been overpowered by others and what happens when a child’s boundaries are compromised.
With my hands, I applied tar to the surfaces of canvas. The tar is dark black and I am attracted to the viscosity of this medium. Tar was the first medium I used when I started painting many years ago. I used tar when I also melted lead and poured it on metal. Lead is of major importance in Germanic mythology. I did not use lead in the new work, but its association with tar in my process development seemed to be enough. Working with tar helped me reflect on
what it means to be German.
In my film, I tore pages from a history book about the Third Reich, a time in Germany’s history that many Germans would prefer to eradicate from memory. Many Germans of my generation would like to expunge this part of our history and to put a leaden blanket onto the past. Yet, it
is important to face and to discuss this past, to show how it was possible for the Nazis to come to power, in order to prevent its imposed trauma and desecration from ever happening again.
The Front Gallery presents Ira Hoffecker Sattler’s oeuvre, History as Personal Memory. This exhibition opens November 7th until November 29th. This is your invitation to directly witness Ira’s work. You will participate in the physical embodiment of a personal yet collective memory.
Ira’s paintings are entrenched with fervency. The powerful presence each work entails
discharges concentrated poignancy forward for your consideration, universal emotions brought
into the public realm for consideration from her personal experiences. Hoffecker’s work is a
rare contemporary experience of the sublime. You will be partaking of jarring beauty.
There is a catalogue which accompanies Ira’s work. Through her remarkable essays, complemented by quotes, pertinent texts Ira discusses how her paintings manifested through her experiences of trauma and history. informs and enables full participation with her work.
Meanwhile in LaLaLand
Meanwhile in LaLaLand
While 104 civilians were killed in Syria by air raids people on Facebook post images of bears in a hammock and baby elephants in a pool.
Meanwhile in La La Land compares simultaneous events from all over the world. Found public domain images from the internet woven together, demonstrate the concomitant incongruity of contrasting incidents of global significance with the banal cultural occurrences and norms that existed during its making to establish cultural disparity, the instability in this world.
Syria’s civil war and the regimes attack with barrel bombs coincided with the Fentanyl crisis in Vancouver with over 150 deadly overdoses per month and Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines. Standing Rock standoffs in Dakota occurred while Peru suffers the worst flooding ever due to climate change. The UN claimed there were 65.3 million forcibly displaced people trying to find refuge while refugee homes burn in Germany. Drone war bomb attacks in Afghanistan, demonstrations against Trump’s policies arose as people lived in the slums of Manila, Chechnya attacked their LGBT community, children starved in Yemen because of war.
These events transpired at the same time people received facelifts, Botox, ‘boob jobs’ and fat suctions.
Meanwhile in La La Land shows the imbalance in today’s world, a result of inequity and a range of responses regarding concurrent world events. The intention is to speak about our Western attitude to crisis on this planet – our willful ignorance, dismissive negation of shared responsibility as well as our emotional paralysis.
Meanwhile in La La Land is a 3:49 min short and is a film by German/Canadian visual artist Ira Hoffecker.
Company: I & M Services Group Inc.
Contact e-mail: ira.hoffecker@gmail.com
Music: La La La song by Soundroll,
Licence b333d811-fea5-4725-a19d-a1d95ad4cef5 by AudioJungle
www.irahoffecker.com
Meanwhile in La La Land was nominated for Best Documentary at the Back in the Box Film Festival in Los Angeles, 2017 and chosen for the Official Selection at the Manchester Film Festival.
Black Milk of Daybreak
BLACK MILK OF DAYBREAK
In my work, I am interested in how Germans deal with collective memory, with
forgetting and suppressing the past as opposed to remembering and comprehending. I
have grown up in Germany after the war, in an environment where forgetting was, and
still is, strongly promoted.
In my paintings, I overlay maps from today onto maps of the Third Reich to
examine the divergent identities of those places over time.
In my recent sound and video work I have been investigating German identity.
I am projecting voices by Holocaust survivors or am using my own voice reading
poems by Holocaust survivors Primo Levi and Paul Celan. The first setting in my video
is the destroyed city of Homs in Syria, which I am juxtaposing to a sound piece: I am
reciting the poem Todesfuge (death fugue) by Holocaust survivor Paul Celan. In the
poem which is full of metaphors, he describes life in a concentration camp in the face of
death. The sound piece is a collaboration with NY composer Concetta Abbate.
In the video, I project those sounds onto images of burning refugee homes in
Germany today, onto right wing populists’ and extremists’ marches occurring weekly in
Dresden, demonstrations against the acceptance of war refugees from Syria. Also, I
have included images of refugees on their odyssey to and through Europe. The video
shows images of the destroyed city of Homs in Syria from 2016 and propounds a new
genocide with the killing of minority groups during the Syrian civil war.
To correspond with Syrian conflicts, I wanted to give agency to an artist, Fareed
Abd Albaki, a refugee artist from Syria. The video includes parts of our interview
recorded in Berlin in 2016.
I included excerpts of Hitler’s voice from his famous ‘prophecy’ speech. Hitler
openly announced that the Jewry of Europe would be destroyed in this January 1939
oration. This is important to know since most Germans after the war denied they knew
what happened to Jews, where Jewish people were taken and their extermination in
concentration camps.
After WWII, political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and many other writers
researched the phenomenon of Germans’ denial of guilt. Acceptance of their culpability
was thwarted when most Germans saw themselves as victims after the war. Many
Germans had lost their houses and their belongings due to bombings or deportation
from former German territories, their ‘Heimat’, their home land. Many women were
raped by soldiers. Millions of innocent civilians had been killed, etc. According to Arendt,
responsibility in its juridical sense, ‘guilt of specific crimes correlated responsibility, was
assignable only to a relatively small number of people.’ 1 Instead of discussing guilt in
Germany after the war, the country needed to be rebuilt and a leaden blanket was put
over the past. ‘Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung’, the coming to terms of Germans with their
past and the discussion regarding the acceptance of guilt only started in the late 1960s.
With the video I intend to juxtapose newly arisen hate against foreigners,
currently against Muslims to experiences of the Holocaust. I want to suggest how things
can escalate if the people of a country do not stand up and protect each other.
In my first year proposal I had suggested that the video will be played in a room
where the text of the protocol of the Wannsee Conference would be projected onto a
wall and would flow down that wall with persistent continuity, over the ground, so that it
flows over viewers in the room. At the Wannsee Conference, which took place on
January 20 th , 1942, the systematic mass produced death of the European Jewry was
decided upon. In this installation, several of my paintings which refer to former Nazi
labour and death camps would be exhibited as well.
This video is a further development of my previous photo series (presented in the
fall semester 2016) pertaining to 12 different genocides. I created a series of images
that are set against the Facebook imagery which I then juxtaposed with the different
genocides by mentioning the year and the place where they occurred.
I have experienced and studied the work of Jaroslav Koslovski. In one of his
works that I saw in Krakow, he represented the place of a genocide with a pigment. I
was also inspired by Hiller’s juxtaposition of normal daily life in today’s Germany to the
Holocaust.
In my photo series I used the shadow of my own body in different places. In my
video, I used my own voice. I wanted to use my own body as a tool for introspection: I
investigate my role in relation to the history of my ancestral culture and my own family
and to my presence in this world today. By using my body, I ask myself what I would
have done if I had lived under the Nazi regime. Would I have stood up and defended
others or would I have been a coward and shut up?
My work reflects on our role as people today, asking, how we may be paralyzed,
when we should stand up and try to prevent bad things from happening. I want to
inspire the viewer to think about his or her own role.
When one walks through the first three rooms of the Permanent Collection in the
House of the Wannsee Conference memorial and museum in Berlin, one can see how
the Nazi regime unfolded. Hitler was elected democratically. Even though he lost the
presidential election in 1932, he was appointed chancellor on January 30 th , 1933. Within
a very short time he became the unanimous ruler of Germany. During the first years,
propaganda of hate against intellectuals, communists, the media and journalists, the
LGBT community and the Jewish communities was built up. Hitler’s supporters and
members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party NSDAP came together in
- 1 Bar on, Bat-Ami: The Subject of Violence: Arendtean Exercises in Understanding, page
57
huge rallies where hate was preached, lies were told and all the atrocities were
announced. More and more people were arrested until no one could question their
dogma and protest, without the fear of arrest and death. At the end of the third room in
this exhibition, the viewer realizes that there are unbelievably strong parallels between
the Nazis initial policies to the politics in many countries today.
It is hard to compare my work to the work of artists like Hiller, Boltanski and Attie.
I know I still need to work hard to continue to find additional and different ways how I
can discuss German identity. Because of my heritage, I want to keep the memory of the
Holocaust alive. I am convinced that if my and subsequent generations learn from our
German past, they become responsible citizens, and will try everything to prevent
hatred and exclusion from ever happening again.
Read BLACK MILK OF DAYBREAK | Statement
In my work, I am interested in how Germans deal with collective memory, with forgetting and suppressing the past as opposed to remembering and comprehending. I have grown up in Germany after the war, in an environment where forgetting was, and
still is, strongly promoted.
In my paintings, I overlay maps from today onto maps of the Third Reich to
examine the divergent identities of those places over time.
In my recent sound and video work I have been investigating German identity.
I am projecting voices by Holocaust survivors or am using my own voice reading
poems by Holocaust survivors Primo Levi and Paul Celan. The first setting in my video
is the destroyed city of Homs in Syria, which I am juxtaposing to a sound piece: I am
reciting the poem Todesfuge (death fugue) by Holocaust survivor Paul Celan. In the
poem which is full of metaphors, he describes life in a concentration camp in the face of
death. The sound piece is a collaboration with NY composer Concetta Abbate.
In the video, I project those sounds onto images of burning refugee homes in
Germany today, onto right wing populists’ and extremists’ marches occurring weekly in
Dresden, demonstrations against the acceptance of war refugees from Syria. Also, I
have included images of refugees on their odyssey to and through Europe. The video
shows images of the destroyed city of Homs in Syria from 2016 and propounds a new
genocide with the killing of minority groups during the Syrian civil war.
To correspond with Syrian conflicts, I wanted to give agency to an artist, Fareed
Abd Albaki, a refugee artist from Syria. The video includes parts of our interview
recorded in Berlin in 2016.
I included excerpts of Hitler’s voice from his famous ‘prophecy’ speech. Hitler
openly announced that the Jewry of Europe would be destroyed in this January 1939
oration. This is important to know since most Germans after the war denied they knew
what happened to Jews, where Jewish people were taken and their extermination in
concentration camps.
After WWII, political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and many other writers
researched the phenomenon of Germans’ denial of guilt. Acceptance of their culpability
was thwarted when most Germans saw themselves as victims after the war. Many
Germans had lost their houses and their belongings due to bombings or deportation
from former German territories, their ‘Heimat’, their home land. Many women were
raped by soldiers. Millions of innocent civilians had been killed, etc. According to Arendt,
responsibility in its juridical sense, ‘guilt of specific crimes correlated responsibility, was
assignable only to a relatively small number of people.’ 1 Instead of discussing guilt in
Germany after the war, the country needed to be rebuilt and a leaden blanket was put
over the past. ‘Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung’, the coming to terms of Germans with their
past and the discussion regarding the acceptance of guilt only started in the late 1960s.
With the video I intend to juxtapose newly arisen hate against foreigners,
currently against Muslims to experiences of the Holocaust. I want to suggest how things
can escalate if the people of a country do not stand up and protect each other.
In my first year proposal I had suggested that the video will be played in a room
where the text of the protocol of the Wannsee Conference would be projected onto a
wall and would flow down that wall with persistent continuity, over the ground, so that it
flows over viewers in the room. At the Wannsee Conference, which took place on
January 20 th , 1942, the systematic mass produced death of the European Jewry was
decided upon. In this installation, several of my paintings which refer to former Nazi
labour and death camps would be exhibited as well.
This video is a further development of my previous photo series (presented in the
fall semester 2016) pertaining to 12 different genocides. I created a series of images
that are set against the Facebook imagery which I then juxtaposed with the different
genocides by mentioning the year and the place where they occurred.
I have experienced and studied the work of Jaroslav Koslovski. In one of his
works that I saw in Krakow, he represented the place of a genocide with a pigment. I
was also inspired by Hiller’s juxtaposition of normal daily life in today’s Germany to the
Holocaust.
In my photo series I used the shadow of my own body in different places. In my
video, I used my own voice. I wanted to use my own body as a tool for introspection: I
investigate my role in relation to the history of my ancestral culture and my own family
and to my presence in this world today. By using my body, I ask myself what I would
have done if I had lived under the Nazi regime. Would I have stood up and defended
others or would I have been a coward and shut up?
My work reflects on our role as people today, asking, how we may be paralyzed,
when we should stand up and try to prevent bad things from happening. I want to
inspire the viewer to think about his or her own role.
When one walks through the first three rooms of the Permanent Collection in the
House of the Wannsee Conference memorial and museum in Berlin, one can see how
the Nazi regime unfolded. Hitler was elected democratically. Even though he lost the
presidential election in 1932, he was appointed chancellor on January 30 th , 1933. Within
a very short time he became the unanimous ruler of Germany. During the first years,
propaganda of hate against intellectuals, communists, the media and journalists, the
LGBT community and the Jewish communities was built up. Hitler’s supporters and
members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party NSDAP came together in
1 Bar on, Bat-Ami: The Subject of Violence: Arendtean Exercises in Understanding, page
57
huge rallies where hate was preached, lies were told and all the atrocities were
announced. More and more people were arrested until no one could question their
dogma and protest, without the fear of arrest and death. At the end of the third room in
this exhibition, the viewer realizes that there are unbelievably strong parallels between
the Nazis initial policies to the politics in many countries today.
It is hard to compare my work to the work of artists like Hiller, Boltanski and Attie.
I know I still need to work hard to continue to find additional and different ways how I
can discuss German identity. Because of my heritage, I want to keep the memory of the
Holocaust alive. I am convinced that if my and subsequent generations learn from our
German past, they become responsible citizens, and will try everything to prevent
hatred and exclusion from ever happening again.
What is Memory
What is Memory accompanies the video History as Personal Memory and questions the
components of memory and their meanings. A multifaceted, sustained explosion of thousands of images along with the historical outbreak of upheaval recalls periods, places, people and events of prewar and wartime German history.
The inclusion of photographs and two short videos from my childhood support a discussion around my girlhood, family life and the personal trauma I have experienced. The merging of my experience of being German through its historical discomfort and my familial innocence thwarted childhood, coupled with the oppressive personal experience, create a fast, precipitous impetus to consider the deeper meanings of memory.
Transparent layers of cityscapes intersect with wartime bombing raids and footage of social and political confrontations by Nazis to the citizens of Germany and to its country. Views of prewar Berlin and the Weimar Republic fold into the emergence of Nazism and the subsequent burning of synagogues. Nazi rallies, and Reich Kristallnacht along with the persecutions of Jewish citizens precede the Blitz. Holocaust atrocities are followed by Nuremberg trials and the Allied Forces infiltration. We are left with the remains of the aftermath of war and a destroyed Berlin.
I include streetscapes, store fronts, and the vestiges of ordinary civic lives; superimposed
soldiers, Nazis, Jews displaced and killed. Nazis rallies are shown with Jewish lives lived and taken. Mass graves interpose. Concentration camp scenes derail. Railway tracks remind that Jewish citizens were transported to the camps by train.
My private connexions and events amalgamate through disparate footage of my memories as a girl, as a family member commingles with the onslaught of public imagery. Excerpts from my childhood journals, inscribed onto 16mm film are interspersed with video images.
Close-up imagery focuses on soldiers mouthing commands, ordinary citizens chatting, Joseph Goebbels, the Nuremberg trial attendees listening, myself when I was a girl drinking from a cup and in another scene standing by my mother, my grandfather’s portrait and several photos of my childhood. Altogether, all memories are one fragmented memory.
Unrelenting, shrill and metallic squeaks form the basis of the soundtrack. My mother’s voice can be heard, speaking about her early memory of Jewish prisoners being led by her family’s house to the Flossenbuerg concentration camp from the nearby Moschendorf labour camp.
I am a participant in the constitution of the German past. My German past and childhood
memory are bound within the German collective memory.
What is Memory is a 3:22 min video.
https://vimeo.com/266882501
Ode to Berlin