Participating artists:Ute Richter, Angelika Waniek, Max Baitinger, Mandy Gehrt, Juliane Jaschnow, Susanne Keichel and Ipke Starke and Slacknetz e.V.
opening hours:Wednesday 4-7pm + Sunday 3-7pm
Venue:IDEAL artspace
Schulze-Delitzsch-Straße 27
04315 Leipzig
The third act of "Remembrance as the highest form of forgetting" questions bearers of memory and testimony in the IDEAL exhibition space and in the neighbouring urban space and asks about the resonance of places of remembrance, objects, monuments and rituals in the present. How do you open up the topicality of what is to be remembered and make its present-day continuities legible? How is the bearer of memory itself embedded in the present in its political, social and temporal contexts?
The third act combines several artistic works across various locations and includes an exhibition in the IDEAL rooms as well as interventions and events in the urban space.Ute Richter's oversized banner in the exhibition space defies simple legibility: "Anti-fascism is no good as a monument". In its ambivalence, the slogan thematises contradictions in the politics of remembrance. Visually, the banner quotes the official political slogans of the GDR in public spaces, which propagated politically sanctioned anti-fascism on large, oversized banners. A video by Juliane Jaschnow with sound editing by Ipke Starke shows the activation of the banner in January 2025 above the canal at the Stelzenhaus.
In her performances, the artist Angelika Waniek addresses the gradual silencing of contemporary witnesses who can report on the crimes of the Nazi era. Who now carries the memory? Who can identify with the past when biographical connections are broken or non-existent? Waniek's approach creates situations in which bodies can engage with historical events and materials in a way that recognises and processes what happened.
In the public space, the exhibition is expanded with a poster work by Max Baitinger, who deconstructs a few seconds in the life of Victor Klemperer, the author of the linguistic analysis of the Third Reich "LTI", in a comic strip. Photographs by Susanne Keichel document the memorial service for the Egyptian Marwa Ali El-Sherbini, who was murdered in a Dresden courtroom on 1 July 2009 for anti-Islamic and xenophobic reasons.
Accompanying programme
16.03.
4 p.m.: Exhibition opening at IDEAL
16.30: Performance by Angelika Waniek
05.04.
2 p.m.: Stelzenhaus district tour of the forced labour memorial
24.04.
5 pm: Performance by Angelika Waniek in cooperation with the exhibition "Partizan★ke Art" at the HGB Leipzig
26.04.
6 pm: Artist talk with Mandy Gehrt at the Pögehaus
30.04.
7 pm: Talk with the curators and participating artists at IDEAL
