Talents

Luise Schröder: Working on the Myth

Luise Schröder

A smouldering fire has eaten its way through the pictures; water stains are also visible. Houses, façades, streets, people, and landscapes overlap and merge into one another, break off and reconnect in new ways. These are the fragments of photographic documents depicting the old and new city of Dresden – starkly damaged, robbed of their form, only partially intelligible. In her series Working on the Myth, Luise Schröder embarks on a search for visible traces through the city’s current and historical, cultural and political layers. She artistically investigates the myth of Dresden between the bombings of 1945 and the flood of the century in 2002 – addressing both its reproduction in pictures and its continuation into the present. Approaching Dresden is like an ideological battleground, one that a variety of different parties lay claim to and shape. In her series, Luise Schröder visualises this battleground in a precise and unsettling way as she questions the permanent, fluid attempts at reconstructing collective memory.