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ESTHER SHALEV-GERZ
Bauhaus-Museum,
Weimar, Germany
March 7th 2022
After a fraught ten days watching the news of an invasion and war now in Ukraine, it feels uncanny that Esther Shalev-Gerz is on the way to Weimar where she will open an exhibition Friday, March 11, at the Bauhaus-Museum, entitled “Inseparable Angels: An Imaginary House for Walter Benjamin” until May 16.
It is not the artist’s first engagement in this city; she has made works inspired by the writer’s sense of time pulling us in multiple directions simultaneously, something that provoked the now well-known, and well-exhibited work that you see here, ANGEL 10, Animated double-faced double-sided clock, 2000-2010.
In 1940 taking in the winds of the cataclysm of WWII, Walter Benjamin adopted an angel drawing by Paul Klee as his mascot. He wrote,
“This Angelus Novus His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
Walter Benjamin, Philosophy of History, 9th Theses, 1940.
Watching the horrors of the past week, I am reminded how writing and art have been impacted by unspeakable cruel acts of man. Never in my lifetime did I expect to see tanks moving into a sovereign European country, indiscriminate bombardments, war crimes against civilians but it is here for us all to see day after day now. Evil among us. Again. Ironically this sculpture of Shalev-Gerz of time going in two directions at once has always warned us, it is forward and backwards unable to get away from the other. I have seen it in the exhibitions here—See it in these exhibition views—, Lausanne, Jeu de Paume, on a rooftop in Geneva, on a barn in Sweden. Now again in Weimar which the Nazis loved so much that they decided to build a concentration camp down the road in the verdant forest.
Anything I might say about this work, or the important photographs and video that accompany, you can see on her website. Ukraine has taken all the words out of my mouth. This is a terrible sensation. One that Walter Benjamin knew well.
More info:
Bauhaus-Museum, Weimar