In this publication, Ulrike Grossarth delineates her singular method for the visual processing of materials from European cultural archives in her project space in Lublin. With the aid of the images by the photographer Stefan Kiełsznia (1911–1987) and the 18th-century literary tradition of Hasidic legends, her research links Jewish life in Lublin in the prewar era with visual materials from cultural archives in Poland (including photographs and posters) and France (Denis Diderot’s and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers), as well as Grossarth’s own work, beginning in 1987, with speculative models concerning the ‘symbolic’ nature of economics. Through her approach, which regards all form types as conditioned rather than as absolute, she presents the individual attributes of her selected motifs so freely that they generate interconnections autonomously, at the same time creating cultural milieus via the ‘activity of the material.’ Particularly in the projects realized in Poland and the Ukraine beginning in 2006, this method was the key to the possibility of complex connections between various historical, cultural, and geographic strands as “a place for the concrete mise en scène of that which can be said in place of abstraction” (Emmanuel Lévinas).weiterlesen