Black on Prussian Blue

How is the difficult past reflected in the landscape? And how does this past begin to resonate with the present? Alongside copies of historical photographs, the core of this work are the black and white drawings of landscapes with vivid blue colouring – the material applied here is soil and the pigment Prussian blue that was widely used not only in Western art, but that was also present in the Zyklon-B gas that the Nazis used during  the Holocaust to kill millions of people. Black earth and Prussian blue are here not only material, but also symbols of the optics of war violence.
In the drawings, the artists have recreated historical photographs from an album that belonged to a soldier of the Nazi German armed forces who was stationed in what is now Ukraine (Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and Russia at the time) during the Second World War. As an amateur photographer, he enthusiastically recorded events and places where he was. His photos reveal a specific approach: temples, cathedrals, parks and castles represent the lands of Western Europe, while images from the occupied lands of Eastern Europe are close-ups of muddy fields. The photographer seems to have seen these lands only as a resource to be conquered, with no other value. At the same time has deliberately avoided showing the traces and evils of war. It is the contrast between these images that tells us much more about the violence experienced by people on the occupied lands.