Biographie
Antine Karla Yzer, born in Bremen in 1993, lives and works in Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin. After training as a photographer, she studied communication design with a focus on photography at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and is currently pursuing her master's degree there. Her focus is on portraits and artistic documentary photography. In her work, she stages the connections between family relationships in a social context and looks at the influence of politics on the individual. Yzer's works have been exhibited at the Sprengel Museum, the Darmstadt Days of Photography and the Zingst Environmental Photography Festival, among others.
Présentation
I don‘t know you and I know you. Dad and Jörg don‘t talk much about you. When they do, the stories sound like tales of another family. A family before ours. I can sense how much su ering you brought them. But who were you? In war, captured, surrounded by death, even at home. Lion cubs for the children and standing in front of a beautiful car. In your nal years everyone was afraid of you. Alcohol and anger and your sons? Lonely, a bit lost, and still a lot of work with you, Grandpa Höxter.
At 30 years old, I am starting to realize how little I know. I couldn`t see the connection between history and our stories and wonder what else has not been seen. Encountering silence, shame, oblivion, repression and confrontation.
consumed by uncertainty examines my family‘s past during World War II. What signi cance does the family‘s collective memory have for the processing of Germany‘s war history, the practice and experience of violence, and the resulting coping mechanisms? What are the possibilities and limits of conveying memories within the family ?
Starting with a box of 6x6 photographs, an adventurous escape story from Russian captivity, and a case of acute alcohol addiction of a close relative, the question arose: What does Antine Karla Yzer actually know about her paternal family history? In the book “Opa war kein Nazi” (Grandpa Was Not a Nazi) by Harald Welzer, Sabine Moeller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, published in 2021 in Frankfurt am Main, interviews about family history with 40 families are conducted and analyzed. Like in these interviews, there were also stories from the Second World War in Yzer’s family. She embarked on a search for traces of violence and war in the subsequent generations. In doing so, she quickly encountered the question of reality. How does the transmission of memories in the family context on this subject matter? Can content be conveyed whose truthfulness cannot be con rmed? When researching the theory, a particularity is noted: the parallels between staging in photography and the transmission of memories. The power of stories arises from gaps and incomplete narratives. Memories within the family are alive, and just like with staged photography, the signi cance can change depending on the recipient and timing. It is not about the familiy trauma of war and violence, but about the di used transmission of memories and the opaque interweaving of one’s own family. German wartime history exists in memory in two di erent forms, in familial transmission and in public knowledge. The extent to which these positions are distant from each other is the basis of the photographic work.