Karwath + Todisko, Father (excerpt), 2022, 4K video, 19:20 min, color, sound, copyright and courtesy of the artist, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022

Karwath + Todisko
Father
01.12.2022 – 15.01.2023

Online screening
01 December, 4:00 p.m. (CET) – 15 January, 4:00 p.m. (CET)

Intervention, reduction, abstraction – for Karwath+Todisko, spatial parameters determine the work. In terms of subject matter, the artist is also concerned with personal relationships within her family. She deals with the actualities of life as well as interpersonal relationships and in doing so encounters patterns of behaviour whose causal connections want to be explored. By deconstructing the respective structures, the artist explores their cause and effect. In this context, Karwath+Todisko deals specifically with the lives of her parents.

The video piece Father allows an insight into the childhood experience of her father during the Second World War, who has been fascinated by trains since his earliest childhood. From this fascination, he began to keep a photographic trainspotting archive,excerpts of which are presented as a slide show in the video. At the same time, segments of a conversation between the two are played as a voice-over, in which the father speaks primarily about his childhood, the war and the relationship to his own father. In the process the ambiguity of his memories is subtly revealed. Photographs and mementos function as important aids in the reconstruction of his experiences. Contrary to the impulse to sugarcoat and conceal her family‘s history, Karwath+Todisko consciously discloses that her grandfather was a member of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party). In doing so, she acts against both the shame and the stigma that might be feared from such a public revelation. Above all, however, her goal is to address subjective experiences and the individual forms of remembrance in relation to National Socialism and the war years, and to fight against forgetting.

Text by Lucy Nixon & Vivien Kämpf

Karwath + Todisko a.k.a. Inna Wöllert (*1973, Darmstadt, Germany) lives and works in Darmstadt. She studied Stage Design and Sculpture at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin in the class of Prof. Karin Sander and Prof. Roland Schimmelpfennig. In 2006 she became Meisterschülerin under Prof. Roland Schimmelpfennig. She has also been active as a lecturer for over ten years. Teaching assignments and lectures have taken her to the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt and to the Accademia di belle ArtiSanta Giulia in Brescia.

Her work has been shown at: saasfee*pavillon, Frankfurt am Main; L187, Offenbach am Main; Basis, Frankfurt am Main; Künstlerforum Bonn; Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz, Berlin and at Kunsthalle Darmstadt. She has also created stage designs at Schauspiel Leipzig, Staatstheater Darmstadt, Theater Oberhausen, and Mousonturm in Frankfurt.  In 2021, she was also awarded the Hessisches Studio Fellowship Program HAP.

Supported by der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien.