Boris von Brauchitsch
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Article in the Magazine of Artificial Image
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| Sensing absence in images seems contradictory in itself at first view. The ability to portray absence at all necessitates a recognizable surrounding area lacking in something that is otherwise expected. A depopulated city, for instance, must first be recognizable as a city so that the residents can be perceived as missing. Thus, at a minimum, abstract, potentially even monochromatic images tell about what is missing. On the contrary. Via abstraction, the removal or subtracting (abstracting) of details, the assertion of universal validity generally grows, but also the risk of generalization and arbitrariness. Amin El Dib is well aware of this and yet he allows abstraction to enter his work in specific instances. And nowhere is it more abstract than in his death images. He sees the image surface as the existential realm and environment of forms and things, as such death lies outside the image. “And in the depths of the image, they (the forms) also loose their existence and consistency. In the play of surfaces and structures, they risk disintegrating into granularity and abstraction,” wrote Amin El Dib in 1993.
The death images are not non-objective works, but images in which subject matter is extinguished. It is not absent, as in Walking the Dog, but destroyed. The artist took his series of eight images from 1993-95, which were already verging on the abstract, and, several years later, reworked them with a sanding machine, making them ultimately unrecognizable. He felt compelled to do so since the images he had used were created in the aftermath of the liberation of the concentration camps. Amin El Dib’s death images now revisit this theme in what is effectively a third step. After producing eight images on the subject and then manipulating these with the sanding machine, he started, with the distance of several years, to enlarge ten outtakes from the sanded images. Each image is presented as a negative and positive version in two horizontally stacked rows. He cannot rid himself of this theme, and, at the same time, he attempts to personally work through the suffering for himself, to transform it into an almost alchemical process, and to convert it into the abstract without abandoning what’s tangible. It is said that people are only really dead when no one remembers them anymore. How someone values this assertion also depends on whether forgetting is seen as something positive or negative. History per se is something that cannot be forgotten without being a memory at the same time. I can only remember what I experience myself, and what we call history almost always lies outside of personal experience. The events in the ghettos and concentration camps are history, the last eyewitnesses die, here attempts to address things artistically beyond well-know horror motifs is appropriate. Amin El Dib has repeatedly questioned his own images critically, rejected and modified them, and developed his own archeology of non-forgetting in multiple layers of time. In doing so, the path led him to the greatest distance possible—manifested in the abstraction, but also in the visible grid points, which make clear that even the preliminary versions were reproductions, information from second- and third-hand sources. But it is this very distance that allows the artist to create an atmosphere, which, in the proper context, is capable of creating a space for reflection. Boris von Brauchitsch, 2014 |
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