Inka Graeve Ingelmann
on
German Images - Looking for Evidence in Rostock, Thale, Solingen and Bielefeld
Rostock Ritz
The first picture by Eva Leitolf that really made an impression upon me is a photograph of a room. It depicts an uncomfortable living room furnished with cast-offs: cupboards made from chipboard and veneer with packets of cheap washing powder piled on top, and freezers that look as if they barely work. It is, however, the view of the closed door rather than the shabby interior that constitutes the centre of the picture. The door really tells the story: the black traces of smoke on the door itself and above the frame, the hastily repaired lock and the blackened calendar with Turkish writing. They are all unmistakable evidence that this was recently the scene of an act of violence.
When Eva Leitolf began her series about attacks on immigrants at the beginning of the 1990s - it was her graduation project under Angela Neuke at the prestigious art school in Essen - the newspapers were full of spectacular pictures of burning asylum hostels, brawling neo-Nazis and baying onlookers. After the heady, intoxicating days of German reunification, a hangover hung over both East and West, and what burst into the open here was the ugly countenance of a past that had been denied but by no means dealt with. However, the shockingly graphic pictures in the tabloid newspapers and on television also offered many people the opportunity to distance themselves from those events and view them as something that had nothing to do with their own lives and their well-cultivated democratic self-image. In the series of 20 pictures that Eva Leitolf called 'Spurensuche' (Looking for Evidence), she relocates those images in the midst of our daily lives. The picture of the Turkish worker's devastated living room was taken in the same town as the photo of a typically German detached house whose clinker cladding and wooden balconies underline the way this house represents the petit-bourgeois dream. The child playing in the front garden takes this idea almost to the point of cliché. Eva Leitolf took both of these pictures in the same neighbourhood. If you place the photographs side by side, you get the impression that the German neighbours remained oblivious of the dramatic events of that night. It is as if the two houses were hundreds of kilometres apart.