Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art: An Introduction

Abstract

Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary ArtAn Introduction Peter Chametzky The urge to migrate is no less "natural" than the urge to settle. Kwame Anthony Appiah One might argue, in fact, that it is simply irresponsible for European states to continue to allow significant segments of their populations to be driven by nostalgia for homogeneity. There is no longer room to pretend that European countries will return to some imagined, idealized state of ethnic and cultural sameness. Rita Chin ich werde deutsch Ich werde deutsch (I become German) provides the provocative title for a series begun in 2008 of large-scale, staged photographs by German photographer Maziar Moradi. Born in Tehran in 1975, Moradi's series 1979 told the story of his own family's experience in and emigration from Islamic revolutionary Iran and won the German Photographic Society's biennial Otto Steinert Prize in 2007. In Ich werde deutsch each image presents a transitional moment, now experienced in Germany, within extended geopolitical narratives of migration not limited to the artist's family or to Iran. Moradi has described the series: I become German tells the stories of young migrants who have left their homelands and begun a new life in Germany, but through their families have grown up with a different cultural background. I've collected stories from these young people with a migration background (Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund) from childhood to adulthood…They relate problems… but also positive experiences and transformations… This project is a continuation of my work about my family, 1979… but this time it's about the next generation, their children.1 [End Page 655] Many of the photographs in Ich werde deutsch depict single, contemplative figures in evocative settings. Time haunts each image, as their subjects appear to be pondering their current situations in relationship to past memories and to futures about which viewers can only guess. In one, a dark-haired woman sits at a kitchen table. The woman and the naked, uncooked "oven-ready" chicken challenging her appear in sharp focus against a blurry background of modern cabinets and kitchen utensils, and a still life of fruit in a bowl. In another, a surgeon slouches alone in an operating room, holding a standard but illegible German identity card in his hands, as his generic scrubs and surgical mask obscure his specific identity. In a third, a blond woman and a dark-haired, swarthy man brood in the front seat of an automobile, each alone in a shared space, with the physical and psychological gap between them echoed by the sliver of dusking sky dividing the dark trees behind and above them. In yet another, a grown woman sits surrounded by dolls. While she is dressed, made-up, and coiffed as if herself a doll, her brown skin contrasts to the real dolls' overwhelming whiteness. In the bottom left, a little red-haired girl looks up at her along a well-defined diagonal axis. Are these the little girl's dolls? No, more careful observation, particularly of the arms, reveals that she too is a doll whose hands are hidden, in contrast to those of the woman, Click for larger view View full resolution Maziar Moradi, Ich werde deutsch (I become German), 2008–13, 100 x 125cm [End Page 656] Click for larger view View full resolution Maziar Moradi, Ich werde deutsch (I become German), 2008–13, 100 x 125cm Click for larger view View full resolution Maziar Moradi, Ich werde deutsch (I become German), 2008–13, 100 x 125cm [End Page 657] Click for larger view View full resolution Maziar Moradi, Ich werde deutsch (I become German), 2008–13, 100 x 125cm large and prominent. The photograph elicits an uncanny response by momentarily blurring the boundary between the animate and inanimate, as in Eugene Atget's famous photograph of mannequins in a Paris shop window. Since, within this pictorial world, the dolls establish a norm of small-sized homunculi, the real-life woman also appears, like Gulliver amid the Lilliputians, disproportionately large and unnatural, a real person trapped in an imaginary world. Moradi's group tableaus are more...