HilbertRaum | »The Golem of Hereford and other Stories«

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) by Anne Heinlein 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 “Wünstungen” 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” by Emmanuel Spinelli and Tom Mudd 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, England between 1179 and 1290 until they all disappeared, most without trace. In an installation using thousands of interview fragments and field recordings of the various locations where those events allegedly unfolded, a computer programm reorders this material in real-time, in a session lasting 30 mins. After each session, the installation prints out the version of the story the programm has just been generated. In this way, “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.

“Die Königin und Schatten” (The Queen and Veils) by Nat Tafelmacher-Magnat explores storytelling in an absent setting, evoking the theatre where the setting of the story has to be imagined or roused instead of represented. As the main character goes deeper and deeper into her own surreal dreams and imaginary worlds, the separation between what is a sketch of a real space and a sketch of an imaginary space becomes blurred, mirroring the main character’s frame of mind.

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