HINTERLAND
2024–2025

Hinterland is a dual video projection about memory, repression, and the repeating patterns of society. At its core lies a dialogue with the work and biography of photographer Gerty Deutsch – a visual-poetic reflection on the question: What happens when history does not repeat itself, but continues to write itself – barely visible, yet deeply felt?

“Once upon a time” becomes a measure of the present. The language of fairy tales – with their repetitions, trials, and transformations – intersects with the reality of a city I live in. A city from which over a thousand Jewish people were deported, shaped by a past that has not passed.

This work does not offer answers. It does not document – it holds. Through the rhythm of the seasons, a cinematic field unfolds between light and shadow, presence and absence. The lyricism of the images stands in contrast to the weight of recorded silence.

All scenes, sounds, and compositions were developed independently – without archival material. What emerges is an artistic position that doesn’t appeal pacifistically, but observes precisely – and in this, becomes political.

 Hinterland was created intentionally outside institutional spaces – in a place where fairy tales were once collected and passed on to children around the world. And it is here that the deeper question arises: What remains when the last witnesses of the Holocaust fall silent – and silence continues to resonate? Hinterland engages with a Zeitgeist in which memory is dissolving – and antisemitic thought patterns once again gain traction, not in hiding, but outspoken, structured, and socially acceptable.