Amine Haase
Finds for the collective memory

They are only vaguely recognizable as people, no shadows, but as figures, illuminated from within, no bright apparitions, rather earth worms, threatening, threatened, as in the afterglow of the atomic bomb. Frontier workers, warning signs of a future of global migrations, burned into our eye and brain. These people have been photographed on the borders between rich and poor countries. Markus Döhne captures these in his Green Screens, Refugee Series. — as warning signs, appeals to the respect for human dignity. The images are far from any pathetic expression, even their process of production is of a strikingly sober directness.

The starting material is — as always with Döhne — from the archives. Here it is thermal imaging of border guards, as it is done regularly in the Bohemian forest, or between Guatemala and Mexico. Döhne transforms the non-images into pictures. He selects details, enlarges them so that reality is often not readily apparent the blown-up reproduction. The artist is counting on the associative capacities of the viewer, his images require not only attention to visual detail, but also knowledge of history and politics. For what distinguishes the work of Markus Döhne is that the formal experiment and the beauty of the results do not obscure the commitment that is behind it, which might be called humanitarian.

The Green Screens, Refugee Series. reveal a surprisingly direct use of photography. The gauze, with which a thin metal frame is covered, is coated with photo emulsion and exposed — virtually turning the printing screen into the image. Though, the complexity of finding the imagery can also be seen in the Arbeitsspeicher. At first sight one believes to see architecture; only slowly one recognizes drawers, closed, half open, in seemingly endless succession next to and above one another. It is the filing cabinet of Peter Weiss, whose Aesthetics of Resistance accompanied Döhne‘s work from the beginning. The photograph showing Weiss in front of his ‚Arbeitsspeicher‘ [storage of memory] is reduced to index card boxes; Döhne copied the detailed pictures many times, deconstructed and put them together again in ever changing variations. Doing this he creates his own ‚Arbeitsspeicher‘ [storage of memory] like a glance into the workshop of the artist. And it becomes apparent what Markus Döhne thinks when he says: „It is my intention to show the way in which photography creates something of a visual, collective memory.“

The equality of photography to the classical art forms of painting and sculpture, drawing and graphics is not self-evident since a long time. Markus Döhne has made important artistic contributions to this development. And he bows to its pioneers. With Vitrinas he places a monument to John Heartfield, who brought about the consecration of new media as art at the Werkbund exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart in 1929. Doing this Döhne always remains contemporary. So Döhne manages with his multiply copied negatives and their interlacing that in Vitrinas the early works look like precursors of Pop Art.
Translated by Gisela Pauli Caldas