Text: Inga Schneider and Helena Weber
Ronit Porat Paradise Bird As part of the Artist Meets Archive-Program of the Internationale Photoszene Köln, the Israeli artist Ronit Porat went on a search for traces of the past in the Graphic Collection of the Cologne City Museum.
For the exhibition „Paradise Bird“, she worked on photo postcards from the years 1918-1938, a period that had also been the focus of her previous work. In German history, these inter-war years are characterised by a progressive artistic striving as well as strong political regression and unrest. In the 1920s and 1930s, cultural life in Cologne was blossoming and the city became a centre of Dadaism. But their protagonists also increasingly faced the threat of professional or even existential destruction by the National Socialists.
Porat traces this complex tension by looking at two protagonists who became the starting point of a new visual narrative: One is the British soldier Charlie, who was stationed in Cologne after the First World War and wrote postcards to his wife Ada in London via field post, showing views of local sights and standing up for an official image of the city. But Charlie himself remains largely unknown. Unlike the other protagonist, the young Luise Straus-Ernst, a cultural journalist who was part of the lively art scene in Cologne alongside her husband Max Ernst who had later left her and she was forced to emigrate to Paris in 1933.
By reassembling the found traces in collages, Porat not only blurs the boundaries between Charlie’s and Luise's biographies, but also between personal and collective experiences and narratives. What emerges from this is an ambivalent pictorial cosmos that tears the photographs out of their context and breaks open their historical narrative. The new combination, layering and juxtaposition of images shatters the interpretive sovereignty of the archive and opposes historical facts and chronologies with an associative world of images.
The shape of the full moon stands like a symbol for this ambiguity and throws an atmospheric twilight on the past Cologne. The exhibition shows that even historical photographs are not merely black and white, but consist of many intermediate tones. The visitors are invited to stroll through an imagined Cologne that questions many things that at first glance seem familiar.