The series What remains shows objects that refugees have brought with them to Germany. These are objects that were so important to them that they didn’t want to leave them behind - or they became so important along the way that they acquired existential meaning for the refugees.

The project is the result of my exploration into ways to mediate the loss of home and identity. I have developed a concept that relates the viewer to the works. In the presentation, I focus on that which remains: refugee luggage.

The owners of the things are themselves not present, though they are brought back into the picture indirectly through the display notes. As the refugees are not themselves visible, they don’t become representatives of a particular situation, crisis or catastrophe. In this way, the work’s universal, existential approach is entangled with the particular in each individual fate, and so a plurality of individual fates is written into the work’s general existential message.

The motifs are hung in frames detached from the print; a gap yawns between the print and the picture. This corresponds to the depicted objects, which are divorced from their functions in the refugees’ memory, taking on a new meaning, an almost metaphysical value. The refugee baggage is framed, not the photographs; a space arises between the work of art and the world.