A series of 9 photographs, each 60 x 90 cm (edition of 7), FineArt-Bond – digital pigment print, lamination 3mm Dibond laminate Insurance value of each photo 2000 Euros
Insurance value of each A4 print, digital pigment print — classic on 190 gram satin paper: 400 Euros (edition of 7)
Artistic Freedom No. 2, as A4 print in 5 portfolios, for sale with other photos of the Lost in Interiors exhibition, Berlin (D)
Concept and performance: Tanya Ury
Camera: Wayne Yung
Digital processing: Ingolf Pink
Double Portraits — a collection of works:
- Hermes Insensed 2000 – 2001
- Franco and Elke J. 2002
- lesser is me more or less 2003
- Your Rules 2004
- or else 2007
- Du bist Einstein 2007
- doo bee doo 2007
- Artistic freedom 2013
These 9 photographs, taken on the premises of a former Stasi prison in Berlin, are also digitally collaged self-portraits, in which Tanya Ury appears twice, once as perpetrator and again naked, as victim. Intimations point in several directions: the divided self in a Germany divided after a right wing tyranny and reunited after an autocratic left wing dictatorship – the stranger in me, within us…
***
In May 2013, I attended “Lost in Interiors”, a photography workshop with the unique opportunity to document on the premises of the former Stasi (state security) interrogation prison Hohenschönhausen, in East Berlin.
“Documents found after the Wall fell reveal meticulous plans current throughout the 1980s, for the surveillance, arrest and incarceration of 85,939 East Germans, listed by name.”1
On the first of the 3‑day workshop participants, along with other visitors to the detention centre, were shown a film, outlining the history of the GDR and its régime of terror. This was followed by a tour of the penal institution with a guide, Harry Santos, who had been imprisoned there for 2 years, as a 27-year-old.
Having heard our guide’s story, told with an intensity and pathos that I have rarely witnessed, I rearranged my ideas for the photo shoot on the following day. My original intention had been to parody the concept of a West German photo workshop in a Stasi prison. However Santos’ testimony and the somatic experience of treading the corridors and four walls, where intellectuals had been incarcerated, motivated me to attempt to create artwork worthy of the internees and their trauma. I decided rather than to simply record the location of torture by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (1949−1989), I would stage photographic re-enactments, in which I would appear as perpetrator and victim: in each image I perform the part of prison guard or interrogator wearing the military look, fashion camouflage but also again naked as the prisoner victim.
“Mielke’s apparatus, directed largely against his own countrymen, was one and a half times as big as the GDR regular army.
After the Wall fell the German media called East Germany ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’. At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees – more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population. In Hitler’s Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens.“2
The prisoners at Hohenschönhausen were political — psychological interrogation methods had been designed to break down the personality so that these writers, artists and musicians, would forthwith desist from political activism. Santos suggested that it worked. During interrogation, questions were not necessarily relevant: “They were unstoppable in their goal to achieve watertight confessions. (…) Better you behaved yourself”, he assured us and: “people who shouted immediately got extra time.” Harry admitted he had been no hero.
The documentary film revealed the use of an X‑ray machine posited behind an interrogation chair – ca. a hundred prisoners, who had been exposed to radioactivity, later died of leukaemia. The East German dictatorship authorised torture; in some cells, lighting remained on day and night. Other cells were inhabited by several prisoners, sleeping together on a wooden pallet, without mattresses; they were not permitted to lean or lie down; should they disobey, lights were turned off. In Harry Santos’ words, fear was absolute because they did not know what was coming next. People were drugged in the prison hospital. Santos showed us a room in which waterboarding took place and he told us of mock executions with blank ammunition. “They don’t leave any visible traces. You can’t prove it happened.”
Santos related other humiliations to which prisoners were subjected: “We were criminalised but we were not criminals”.
On arrival, whether male or female, all detainees had to strip naked, and undergo a body search; they were regularly taken into corridors to stand naked with their arms leaning against the walls for long periods of time. A segment of historical film in the documentary “Zentrale des Terrors“ (Headquarters of Terror) by Helmuth Frauendorfer and Hubertus Knabe 2003, demonstrated a woman prisoner being secretly filmed while undressing.
The photo series remembers abuse that took place in Hohenschönhausen, Germany some 25 years ago, but reminds also of institutionalised torture and humiliation that is still common practice in many parts of the world today – the images are a salute to the scandalous photos coming out of the US detention camp in Abu Ghraib, Iraq 2004.
I call the series Artistic Freedom, because it points to the freedom denied political prisoners held at Hohenschönhausen. But here, I also allow myself artistic freedom, that is poetic license, when I re-enact the roles of perpetrator and victim in these environs. My motivation was also to better understand the behavioural constructs furthered by this and other tyrannical regimes, by embodying them. Arno Gruen, in his writings on the stranger within, interprets the psychology of this behaviour process exactly:
“The Stranger in us. That is the part of us, that we have lost, and that we try to find for the rest of our lives. In our culture it is common that in childhood, one is rejected when one doesn’t fulfil the expectations of adults. At the same time, the child should not be allowed to live as if it were worthless, for that would contradict the myth, that we do everything for the sake of love, that it’s all for the best. In this way being a victim becomes the source of the unconscious state, in that one’s own life is cast out as something strange, and must be denied. This part of the self is what the person will from henceforth be searching for. Without being conscious of the fact. It is this searching that is our downfall.
Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo “Butcher of Lyon”, who tortured Jean Moulin, the French resistance fighter to death, told Neal Ascherson in an interview (1983) that: “As I interrogated Jean Moulin, I had the feeling that he was me.” That is to say – what the “Butcher” did to his victim, he did in some way, to himself. What I am suggesting is this: the hatred of strangers always also has to do with self-hatred.
If we want to understand why people torture and humiliate other people, we first have to engage with what we loathe in ourselves. For the enemy that we believe we see in other people must initially be found within. We would like to silence this part of ourselves by destroying the stranger who, because he resembles us, reminds us of this. That is the only way we can keep what has become estranged in ourselves, at a distance. This is the only way we can continue.3
Tanya Ury 2013
Postscript:
After security officers were accused of mistreating inhabitants of a North Rhine-Westphalia refugee hostel, further cases have emerged in Essen and Bad Berleburg. The photos of the asylum centre in Burbach, North Rhine-Westphalia, which circulated through the press, in September 2014, remind of the outrage in an Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison 2004 and confirm that people are being tortured in Germany again today – a fact that is extremely disturbing.
On a mobile phone photo, a man can be seen lying on the floor, on his stomach, with his hands tied behind his back. A guard has his foot placed on his head, while another kneels down at his side. These are like the scenes we have seen in Abu Ghraib, the notorious US torture prison in Iraq. But this atrocity took place in Germany, where the refugees were seeking protection.4
1 P. 62 “Stasiland – Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall“, Anna Funder 2003, Granta Books GB ISBN978 1 84708 335 7 (Notes on Sources p 284: The Stasi File Authority’s report on Stasi preparations for the incarceration of citizens on ‘Day X’ is ‘Vorbereitung auf den Tag X – Die geplanten Isolierungslager des MfS’ by Thomas Auerbach and Wolf-Dieter Sailer, BstU, 1995) 2 P.56 – 57, Ibid 1 (Notes on Sources p 283: For figures on KGB agents in the Soviet Union, Gestapo personnel during the Nazi régime and Stasi employees and agents, see John O. Koehler, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police, Westview Press, Boulder CO, 1999, pp.7 – 8. On Erich Mielke’s life, see Jochen von Lang, Erich Mielke: Eine deutsche Karriere, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1993; Koehler, pp. 33 – 72. For Mielke’s famous speech in parliament see Der Spiegel 46⁄1999 (15 November 1999), ‘Wende und Ende des SED-Staates (8)’, at www.spiegel.de/spiegel. This speech is also available at ddr.im-www.de/Geschich… Mielke’s pronouncements on traitors and execution come from the television documentary Die Stasi-Rolle: Geschichten aus dem MfS by Stefan Aust, Katrin Klöcke, Gunther Latsch and Georg Mascolo, Spiegel TV, 1993.) 3 The Stranger in us – Living authentically through Empathy – A lecture by Arno Gruen at the Lindau Psychotherapy Weeks 2009, DVD: Auditorium Netzwerk (Translation Tanya Ury) 4 mobil.morgenpost.de/mp…
Presentation
2014 (05.07 – 12.10.2014) Opening 7pm 4th July, Tanya Ury presents Artistic Freedom, 7 of 9 photos in “Lost in Interiors – Photographic Positions on Political Imprisonment” a group exhibition, to the “25 Jahre Mauerfall” programme (25 Years After the Fall of the Wall), in Berlin, about Hohenschönhausen, the former Stasi prison, at Projektraum – PhotoWerkBerlin, c/o Kommunale Galerie Berlin, Hohenzollerndamm 176, 10713 Berlin (D). At the opening (8pm) Kasander Nilist will accompany Tanya Ury’s poetry, improvisation on the historical theme, in English and German, with free improvised music on double bass.
2014 (2.12.) A video documentation of the performance concert “Lost in Interiors“ (25 Years After the Fall of the Wall), 4th July in Berlin, about Hohenschönhausen, the former Stasi prison, at the Kommunale Galerie Berlin (D) — Kasander Nilist with free improvised music on double bass accompanies Tanya Ury’s poetry with improvisation on the historical theme, in English and German — can be seen on Vimeo at this link:
2015 (18.1−15.2) Tanya Ury presents Artistic Freedom, 9 photos and ca six hour long video loop with text as audio performance and visual concrete poetry. A performance by Tanya Ury (text) and Kasander Nilist (double bass) – improvised poetry and improvised music on the group exhibition theme “The Stranger in Me”, curated by René de Rooze, with an opening talk by art historian David Stroband of the Art Academy Minerva Groningen, takes place 3 pm at SMAHK gallery, Assen (NL)
2015 (27.2. – 1.3.) No. 7 & 9 from the photo series Artistic Freedom, presented on the Büchergilde Gutenberg artclub at the German-Dutch Graphic Arts Fair in Borken (D)
2015 (12. – 15.3.) No. 7 & 9 from the photo series Artistic Freedom, presented on the Büchergilde Gutenberg artclub stand, at the Leipzig Book Fair (D)
2016 (23. – 25.9) Tanya Ury presents Artistic Freedom, 5 of a series of 9 (nos. 1, 2, 4, 5, 9), projected photos in “Menschenräume” (Human Spaces – opening on Friday 23rd September from 7 pm), curated by 68elf, at the “Odonien” art space, Hornstrasse 85, D‑50825 Cologne, as part of the “International Photoscene Cologne 2016” (D)
Publications & Presss
2014 (14.7) Article by Thomas Schubert in Berliner Woche (Berlin Week) online on “Lost in Interiors – Photographic Positions on Political Imprisonment” a group exhibition (05.07 – 12.10.2014), to the “25 Jahre Mauerfall” programme (25 Years After the Fall of the Wall), in Berlin, about Hohenschönhausen, the former Stasi prison, at Projektraum – PhotoWerkBerlin, c/o Kommunale Galerie Berlin (D), featuring Tanya Ury and Artistic Freedom (7 photos).
www.berliner-woche.de/…/46553-kommunale-galerie-eroeffnet-neue-ausstellung/
www.photowerkberlin.co…
2015 (2) Tanya Ury’s photo series Artistic Freedom has been discussed by Wolfgang Grätz in the Artclub journal no. 73, photography edition, and the Frankfurt Book Club, Bookseller’s Shop website (D)
www.buechergilde.de/tl… and www.grafikbrief.de/kue…
Artist’s Writings & Publications
2015 (1.4. – 30.6.) Artistic Freedom No. 7 & No. 9, each 35 x 23.5 cm (edition of 20), glossy digital laser exposure, presented for sale in the Büchergilde Buchhandlung-Magazin (Book Guild Gutenberg Coöperative Magazine) Frankfurt am Main (D) Price for members 400 Euros, non-members 650 Euros
2016 (9.) Tanya Ury’s photo no. 02 from the series Artistic Freedom published with a text, pages 155 – 158, in the Bet Debora Journal III – Engendering Jewish Politics – Frauenpolitik für ein Modernes Judentum, German-English, Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag Berlin ISBN 978−3−95565−131 (D)
2016 (9.) Tanya Ury’s photos nos. 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, from the series Artistic Freedom published with a text, pages 201 – 204 of the catalogue to “Menschenräume” (Human Spaces) “International Photoscene Cologne 2016” (D)
2018 (10) Images and text — Tanya Ury’s photo series Artistic Freedom (No. 9), published in “Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance — Danger, Im/mobility and Politics”, a book publication, publ. Avant-Gardes in Performance, Palgrave Macmillan. Editors: Aneta Stojnić and Marina Gržinić ISBN 978−3−319−78342−0 www.palgrave.com/de/bo… (UK)