Comments on Sara 1940-2012, 2014

In my woven photo pictures I examine the process of remembering and the selectivity and sampling quality to memory images. Photographs are always representations of something that is past which thus can only be remembered. Memories are constructs of a now. 

Our memories are constituted out of various experiences and perceptions – part of what we experience we forget or consciously exclude while others are embroidered.
On one level the woven photo image shows a large portrait of my mother Sara and on the other many small pictures, the stations of her life. Weaving the two levels means that there are always parts of a picture that are covered up, just as our memory is only partial and fragmentary. In addition to the braided photo image, this installative work includes further fragments of Sara’s life: a drawing, a handed-down family treasures-bag with Transylvanian Saxony cross stitch embroidery – and a photo montage depicting the village of Zendersch where my mother’s family came from. 

In the foreground are my two great grandmothers, my grandmother, mother and aunt, all of whom had to leave their homeland in 1943 within a few hours taking only the few possessions they hurriedly threw together. This tragedy of having lost everything is like something embossed on the psyche, something that a family carries around with them for generations.
Brigitte Konyen, 2014