MCP501 Proposal Year 1

MFA: Year One Proposal - Module 501

Submission Date Full Name

01 – Title of project: tbd Camp Moschendorf (investigation of identity)

Ira Hoffecker-Sattler

02 – Name of student and any collaborators and their roles

student Ira Hoffecker
collaboration/interview with Dr. Peter Gary, Holocaust survivor,and collaboration with composer and musician Concetta Abbatte for one of the recordings for the sound piece

03 – Advisors tbd

03.A - Please check off all areas that relate to your work:

If other or additionally was selected please elaborate here:

Memory, Forgetting, Trauma and the Archive Other or additionally:

Identity of a certain place over the course of time

04 – Description of proposed project or body of work – practical element

The project is an installation consisting of several elements:

sound piece, painting and sculpure, photography all investigating identity in Germany. Painting, sculpture are talking about one certain place, Camp Moschendorf and look at its historic layers. Sound and photography juxtaposes times of the Nazi Regime to today. 

05 – Description of project report or thesis – written element

Ideally I would like to write about the different elements of my sound piece (see proposal) in detail. Alternatively I am interested in studying artists who investigated identity after WWII like Beuys, Boltanski, Kiefer, Richter, Baselitz etc.
Or : I would also write about different contemporary installation artists and their way to investigate identity.
the result would be an installation piece containing several, different mediums and a thesis . 

06 – Anticipated results, e.g. documentation, performance, script, intervention, website, exhibition, book, journal

the result would be an installation piece containing several, different mediums and a thesis . 

07 – Initial bibliography for written element 

- Dr. Norbert Kampe: The Wannsee Conference and the Genocide of the European Jews, House of the Wannsee Conference, Berlin, ISBN 978-3-9808517-8-7

- Huyssen, Andreas : Twilight Memories, Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, Published in Great Britain by Routledge, 1995, ISBN HB 0415 909341 1,

- Biro, Matthew : Anselm Kiefer, Phaidon Press Limited, London, ISBN 978 07148 61432, March 2013

- Peterson, Abby: Wounds That Never Heal: On Anselm Kiefer and the Moral Innocence of the West German Student Movements and the West German New Left, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Cultural Sociology, Academic Journal, September 2012, ISSN: 1749-9755

-Saltzman, Lisa: Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz; Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-521-630-33-9

8 research statement: how do artists (abc) investigate identity and juxtapose events from the past to today? At the moment I think I should look at artists who investigated German identity after the war, such as Beuys, Richter, Kiefer, Boltanski, etc. But after discussing this subject with you in the summer, visual artists like Tatiana Trouve (in regards to installation), Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Isa Getzken, Cornelia Parker and others might also be very interesting

 

9 in my work I am looking at the different historic layers of certain places like for example Berlin and am interested in the different identities one place can have over time. As a German I am interested in how society dealt and deals with coming to terms with the past, discussing collective memory, forgetting, suppressing, accepting the past as our heritage, remembering and working through this trauma etc. In my painting work I overlay different maps from the past and from today to talk about these layers. In further projects for my MFA now, like a sound piece, I would like to create an additional body of work, still painting simultaneously, that juxtaposes events from the past to current events. As mentioned in my blog 'First year proposal', I would like to focus in my work on one former camp (forced labour camp during Nazi times, then refugee camp, now fabrication hall), Camp Moschendorf in Bavaria, Germany, for my MFA piece.

10a artists to compare: depending on how long and complex the thesis should be:

As far as German art in regards to investigation of identity after the Second World War is concerned I would name Kiefer, Richter, Beuys and Baselitz. Also I find Christian Boltanski’s oeuvre very interesting.
I am not really experienced with sound artists. I have looked at Susan Hiller’s work, Pipilotti Rist and Bruce Naumann. I would also like to include a piece using my own body and have looked at Carrie Mae Weems, Frieda Carlo and Kiefer again. As you can tell, for the moment I am not really sure who these three pieces and artists should be. What I know though, is that I am interested in investigating identity of one specific place in Germany, during and right after the war and juxtapose it to today’s times, but I would like to present my work as an installation combinging several mediums.
As far as an installation is concerned, something I want to create during my MFA, a combination of painting, sound, photography to investigate identity I was definitely influenced by Tatiana Trouve. She would be a good artist to look at for my research, I think her installations are meaningful and really touch and engage me. So I could also do research on three installation artisits who talk about identity. Besides Tatiana Trouve, Isa Getzken and Cornelia Parker would be good to investigate. 

10B. Provide one to three themes, questions, topics, issues, threads etc. to discuss, compare and contrast which are relevant to your work. IDENTITY, HISTORIC LAYERS, MEMORY

10c I will look at other artists that talk about historic identity. As mentioned in 10a I would like and discuss first who I should do my research on in order to pursue my theme of investigation of identity. I will ask how these artists investigated identity in their work. Also I am interested in discussing artists work, who juxtapose events from the past and compare them to today’s times and events, just as I want to do in my sound piece.

10d The sound project (which I have explained in more detail in my proposal) will support my creative work in that I will be using a different, actually an additional medium than painting and would like to create an installation that consists of different mediums. My research will consequently go into different directions, focussing though, on artists who discuss identity, working with any medium. So far in my work, I have only used painting and sculpture to investigate identity. In the past I have ‘just’ created one painting after the other, never really considering its presentation. Now, I would like to prepare an installation that combines several mediums. Painting, sound, video, photography etc and think about how I would install the work in a big gallery space. I would like to discover and discuss more conceptual contemporary artists who discuss identity of places such as I do in my work

 

10E. Are you excited to get started reading and writing about what you are researching?

Yes

Here is a statement I just wrote for my upcoming exhibition at the Jewish Zack Gallery in Vancouver.

Ira Hoffecker                                                           Artist Statement

My paintings are informed by the different identities cities take on over a period of time.

I am interested in how different societies transform and change city spaces over the course of the centuries. My work examines the relationships between people and cities by responding to constant change, reconstruction and restoration in the urban landscape.

Decay, erasure, covering, revealing and rebuilding take place at the same time and are part of my painting practice. I see my process of covering as a metaphor of forgetting and suppressing the past. The process of revealing and sanding the surface down alludes to a process of remembering and coming to terms with historic events. In many of my paintings I use layers of resin which physically separate one layer of paint from the previous one, and create actual and perceptual depth. Those layers are equivalent to the archaeological strata in the evolution of a city. Places are overlaid with multiple histories, layers of paint cover and obscure but each coat is also informed by the previous layer.

I adopt geometric shapes inherent in architecture and maps from different times in history provide the basis of my compositional language. Studying history books, maps and photographs, as well as digesting the city by walking the streets, all inform my understanding of the identity of a place.

On a personal level, my paintings embody my own memories and the cities’ atmospheres, which I am translating through shapes, colours and lines: marks that articulate the physicality of painting. I use painting to explore the city’s evolution and add my own experience to the context.

In my recent work, I was interested in researching the six different political governments and/or regimes and different identities the city of Berlin saw during the past 150 years. Berlin was the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia (1701–1871), then it was the Capital of the German Empire (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1919–33) and the Third Reich (1933–45). Berlin in the 1920s was the third largest municipality in the world. At the end of the Second World War Berlin was almost completely destroyed as a consequence of the Nazis’ politics. After the war the city was divided until its reunification in 1989.

Especially for this exhibition I have created a body of work that talks about Berlin’s former Jewish quarters, the Scheunenviertel and Spandauer Vorstadt. By the time the Red Army liberated Berlin in 1945, of Berlin’s one-time population of 160,000 Jews before WWII, 55,000 were murdered, 7,000 committed suicide and over 90,000 emigrated. Nazis had erased Jewish life in Berlin and all over Europe. We Germans must never forget that. We must learn from our past and come to terms with this guilt. As horrible as this guilt and the memory of the Shoah is, Germans must accept it as part of their heritage, as part of their identity instead of trying to forget and trying to suppress the past.

Several paintings quote a poem ‘Death Fugue’ by Paul Celan, born as Paul Antschel to a German speaking Jewish family in Romania. His family was killed in concentration camp and Celan survived the war in a forced labour camp. This famous poem is a depiction of concentration camp life. The poem was written in German, Todesfuge. Here is the first verse of the poem, translated into English:

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening

we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night

we drink and we drink

we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped

A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes

he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta

he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling, he whistles his hounds to come close

he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground

he commands us to play up for the dance.

Together with a composer from New York, Concetta Abbate, I have also recorded a sound piece of the Todesfugue, to which you can listen here at the Zack Gallery.