Der Blinde Fleck The blind spot

The exhibition title The blind spot, which in the literal sense describes a purely optical phenomenon, serves in these investigations as a metaphorical vehicle that allows us to associatively sound out the mechanisms and meanings of forgetting, selective disremembering, and memory repression, in individuals as well as in sociopolitical living contexts. Assembled here are contemporary positions by artists who exemplarily approach this theme’s philosophical, socio-political, and individual psychological dimensions in their investigations, research, and critical examinations.

Current debates about the politics of memory and remembrance include aspects of memory repression and forgetting, since remembering and forgetting form a dialectic pair; these are two sides of one and the same coin. Pursued within the context of this exhibition are questions about how society deals with collective traumas, about the significance of selective memory in societal systems, and about the methods and recollection practices of individuals and the identity constructions associated with this.
The exhibition shall also reflect on such things as how human memory functions biologically, and why forgetting is more often considered a negative characteristic. One of the central issues examined is that of artificially created collective amnesia, a topic that pertains not only to events of the communist era in former Eastern Bloc countries.

In addition to a systematic introduction by curators Lith Bahlmann and Anke Hoffmann, the catalogue, which bears the same name as the exhibition, contains extensive text and pictorial material about the artistic works presented, complemented with essays by Culture Historian Max Glauner, Latvian Art Theorist Mara Traumane, Doctor and Literary Scholar Yvonne Wübben, and Film Scientist Matthias Wittmann.
ISBN: 978-3-938515-20-4, dt./engl.