Artistic Statement

How can you depict history through artistic means? What possibilities are there to create current references to past events and how can interaction with material objects contribute to such a process? What kind of "baggage" does a dancer take with her when she is forced into exile? These are some of the questions that Simon Wachsmuth answers in his video installation "Qing".

His family is closely linked to the dance avant-garde of the early 20th century. The artist is not only the grandson of the Viennese dancer Gertie Tenger. Dita, his great-aunt, his German-born grandfather Werner Wachsmuth and his sister Ellinor Tordis were also modern dancers. However, with the rise of fascism in Germany and Austria, the situation for the Tenger sisters became dangerous due to their Jewish origins. Thus, Wachsmuth's great-aunt Dita did not return to Vienna after a trip to Shanghai in the mid-1930s, and her sister Gertie tried to escape persecution by the regime. She tried to travel to her sister in Shanghai. However, she is denied tto enter to this country of refuge. Her parents were murdered in the Sobibor and Theresienstadt concentration camps. She survived the Nazi period in Vienna with her son.

At a time when mail from China could still be received in Vienna, Gertie Tenger-Wachsmuth received a package from her sister Dita, who had moved to Shanghai to escape National Socialism. The package contained three silk robes from the late Qing Dynasty, which ruled the Chinese Empire from 1644 to 1911.

The video installation "Qing" is a choreographed journey through time and space. The film drives Gertie Tenger on a journey that she could never make, from Vienna to Shanghai, from West to East. “Qing” plays with the material and the evocative qualities of the objects, the fragility and the delicacy of the fabric of the porcelain. Loulou Omer's choreography and dance enliven the objects, which sometimes offer protection and sometimes depict the disturbing encounter with the unknown. Although the objects are interwoven with the artist's family history, they transcend their meaning in the present, thus telling a story of uprooting and the experience of alienation.