Top
Fundstücke Kosovo 2000
Watch
Frauke Eigen photographed evidence of the Balkan genocide
A watch whose hands stopped precisely at 5.32 and 17 seconds p.m. Water has entered into its casing, the glass was shattered. Another image: The threadbare remains of man’s underwear, blooden crusted cloth. A third: a short-sleeved man’s shirt, one side of the collar is torn of, the right shoulder and a large part of the back are missing.
These are terrifying testimonies. Because these clothes which the Berlin-based photographer Frauke Eigen has captured, come from a mass-grave in Kosovo. When it was opened and exhumed, she was allowed to watch. Not much is known about the person who once wore these pieces of clothing. They were discovered below a meadow, recalls Frauke Eigen and tells this story in her trademark hushed voice: “The bodily remains were scattered throughout a grassy hill. Excavators would remove layer and layer of soil while five people in protective white suits were standing nearby shouting every time they discovered an arm or a leg. Towards the edge of the meadow, people from the village were sitting who knew perfectly well that someone like their father lay there.“ She took photographs of such remnants which were then cataloged as evidence for the war tribunal in The Hague. Photographs that were also taken all over the Balkan by the investigators but hers are maybe a bit more beautiful. As of today, they are being exhibited at the gallery Camera Work – and meant to be sold.
A fact that makes the 32-year-old artist slightly uncomfortable, although she is the first photographer without an international reputation to enjoy the privilege of being exhibited in a space normally reserved for the likes of Leni Riefenstahl oder Helmut Newton. Is it admissable to turn into art the remnants of victims of genocide? A question that Frauke Eigen keeps asking herself as well. She is quite aware of treading on thin ice and doing a balancing act between sensationalism and distance. Which is why this series entitled Fundstücke Kosovo 2000 (Lost and found from Kosovo 2000) is not actually adorning the walls of the gallery like other works would but is presented in a slipcase that the viewer has to leaf through as though it was a book. “I am not out to make money with this“, she says, guardedly. Whatever money will be made from it is meant go to a relief organisation in Kosovo.
Still, an uneasy feeling lingers and this for the simple fact that she was able to take these photos because nobody from the German contingent much cared whether she was watching the exhumation.
When American investigators took over, she was thrown out on the spot, regardless of her official authorization from The Hague. Her presence at this site of horrors was simply not requested. Naturally, she says. Naturally, because if you look at it superficially, nothing distinguishes me from a photo-journalist. It is very difficult to explain that part of my motivation is to create pictures which I have seen a thousand times.
Woman with braid
Bosnia
Her first foray into the former Yugoslavia was as photographer with the official German relief organisation Technisches Hilfswerk back in 1996. She had been wanting to go for much longer and simply grabbed at the chance when the THW was looking for someone to document their rebuilding
efforts. She found herself driving through the region in an official car, visiting refugee camps, villages, and relief projects set up in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Macedonia. When she confronted people with her
Hasselblad, it was not for the sake of capturing their devastation – not a single one of her images shows the ruins of a war-ravaged country. It was for the sake of capturing the open, exhausted face of an elderly woman, light falling on her head from above making her hair look a silvery color. Frauke Eigen had previously asked her – and all models – not to look directly into the camera which resulted in a strangely enraptured atmosphere. “I am not telling a story, I am showing pictures which have no beginning and no end. Furthermore, they will not betray where they are from“, explains Frauke Eigen.
“They are what they are.“ Only art will allow itself the luxury of such self-assertion. But in a situation where photos which differ only slightly from hers, are being used to document war crimes, FraukeEigen’s refusal to explain them comes across as blasphemy. What is also difficult to bear is the fact that from such horrors springs a kind of picturesque beauty. It can best be seen in the photos of darkened landscapes which she took at the Obersalzberg. The sweetness of the Alpen panorama proved counterproductive to her attempts to search for traces of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi amusement park. Instead, something else was created, equally imposing and oppressive.
There is a reason why Frauke Eigen would count fellow student Wolfgang Tillmans, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, or Siegmar Polke among her influences. These artists possess a similar ‘spätromantisch’ emotional attitude with sensations of transitoriness, death, emptiness are swirling around. It is also Eigen’s wish to approach something manifest of which she feels inadequate, due to her subjective perspective, to give it its due.
Their models may look past the camera so not to reveal themselves. But this act also makes the artist herself vanish.
Article in The Tagesspiegel 2001