Commemorating Mother

Anne Prenzler: "...The theme of the photo series »Muttergedenken« (Commemorating Mother, 2009) also contains an alleged female connotation. However, in no way is it just the memory culture of women that is being examined here. The persons doing the commemorating remain strangely anonymous, although we gain a very intimate look into their private sphere. Within the context of her own biography, for this ongoing series Joanna Schulte sought out people who had lost their mothers, inquiring into the way in which they evoke their memory of them. A photograph, the medium of recollection in our contemporary culture, always plays a role. The pictures of the mothers are always found in private interiors—on a bookshelf, a dresser, or a desk, and beside them a vase of flowers, an alarm clock, a lamp, a devotional image, books, other photographs, and things that cannot be categorized.
Here, too, the objects allude to stories, the contexts remain fragmentary, and yet they develop a wealth of moods and images. This documentary examination is not aimed at gaining insight, nor is it a commentary. Rather, we are yet again confronted with a theme in a way that is as direct as it is cryptic and that for all of its intimacy and ostensible marginality could not be more general—for
every one of us will sooner or later have to deal with the death of our own parents, our own mother, or has already had to do so. This testifies to the intelligence with which Joanna Schulte proceeds. By choosing the commemoration of someone who has died as her point of departure, she also brings to mind the relationship with one’s own mother and the complexity with which it is so often fraught.
These pictures are therefore as gentle as they are lastingly effective. The artist time and again uses small, almost modest things in order to positively capture and permanently occupy us. The disquiet these works elicit constitutes the essence of her consistent artistic strategy. The radicalism with which she goes about her work is reminiscent of artists such as Christoph Schlingensief or Thomas Hirschhorn, both of whom avail themselves of a very different orientation in order to radically disrupt our attitudes toward political and social issues. And even if Joanna Schulte initially has her sights set on our inner world, her works develop an all the more lastingly critical, social, and generalizing dimension.