Facetten des Erinnerns/Facets of Memory

Unacknowledged by the art community or society at large, in November 2016 Hamburg saw the first large scale exhibition of an art project to tackle the public memory — or lack therof — of the traumatic “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, unleashed by Mao Zedong in 1966. As far as I know, the project initiated by Ni Shaofeng, in which he and his friend Deng Huaidong appropriated propaganda photos made during the Cultural Revolution and transformed them into disfigured large scale ink installations and oil paintings, was the first of its kind in the world.

I was lucky to be able to accompany most of the preparatory work leading up to the exhibition with my camera. Now that all the films have been developed and the negatives sorted, I want to share the impressions I captured of the exhibition.

You can find my photos documenting the exhibition here, or through the menu of this homepage.

 

Ni Shaofeng, painter

The painter Ni Shaofeng.

In the last months of 2016 I had the chance to help Ni Shaofeng set up his exhibition “Facetten des Erinnerns” (facets of memory) which tackled the difficult memory of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the 50th anniversary of which was also last year.

With close access to both the artist and the preparatory work leading up to the exhibition, I didn’t miss the chance to document it all on film. With over 340 exposed negatives, I’m still busy sorting through them in the evenings. I’m nearing the end though, hope to get the finished photos up here around the middle of February.

For some impressions of the exhibition, the official homepage is a good start:

Greatculturalrevolution.com

There is also my own coverage of the preparatory work on the exhibition here.