The book *Hunting in Time* is based on a trilogy of exhibitions by artist Ronit Porat, which were shown at various venues between 2016 and 2018. This body of work revisits a murder that took place in Berlin in January 1931 and made headlines throughout the Weimar Republic: Fritz Ulbrich, a local watchmaker, was murdered in his shop by a sixteen-year-old named Lieschen Neumann, her boyfriend, and another youth. The murder investigation and trial revealed that during the decade preceding the murder, Ulbrich had turned the backroom office of his workshop into a pornographic photography studio, where he photographed hundreds of young girls, including Neumann.
Porat’s artistic practice begins with extensive research in photo archives, collecting images from various sources, and merging different taxonomies and found objects from periodicals with personal autobiographical references. She initially assembles the images into what she calls “index sheets,” which subsequently take shape as the exhibited photographic collages and mural installations. Rather than merely recounting the factual elements of the historical case, she seeks—through the period’s multitude of historical threads and photographic mechanisms—to trace and outline patterns of human behavior and the emotional transition from victim to perpetrator, in which the photographic gaze plays a pivotal role.
The project unfolds the Ulbrich-Neumann story in a fragmentary, non-linear, non-narrative manner. It questions the ability to reconstruct a reliable, formal retelling of the story, instead proposing the archive as a meeting point of collective narratives that can be activated and reinterpreted in multiple ways. By conjuring up collective and personal phantoms, the project strives to recount a multifaceted tale of desire and violence, as well as the ways in which they are etched into and evoked by our photographic memory.
Text by: Ines Weizman, Graphic Design: Inedition, Eva van der Schans.
Distributed by Idea Books, Edited by Sternthal Books.
The book *Hunting in Time* is based on a trilogy of exhibitions by artist Ronit Porat, which were shown at various venues between 2016 and 2018. This body of work revisits a murder that took place in Berlin in January 1931 and made headlines throughout the Weimar Republic: Fritz Ulbrich, a local watchmaker, was murdered in his shop by a sixteen-year-old named Lieschen Neumann, her boyfriend, and another youth. The murder investigation and trial revealed that during the decade preceding the murder, Ulbrich had turned the backroom office of his workshop into a pornographic photography studio, where he photographed hundreds of young girls, including Neumann.
Porat’s artistic practice begins with extensive research in photo archives, collecting images from various sources, and merging different taxonomies and found objects from periodicals with personal autobiographical references. She initially assembles the images into what she calls “index sheets,” which subsequently take shape as the exhibited photographic collages and mural installations. Rather than merely recounting the factual elements of the historical case, she seeks—through the period’s multitude of historical threads and photographic mechanisms—to trace and outline patterns of human behavior and the emotional transition from victim to perpetrator, in which the photographic gaze plays a pivotal role.
The project unfolds the Ulbrich-Neumann story in a fragmentary, non-linear, non-narrative manner. It questions the ability to reconstruct a reliable, formal retelling of the story, instead proposing the archive as a meeting point of collective narratives that can be activated and reinterpreted in multiple ways. By conjuring up collective and personal phantoms, the project strives to recount a multifaceted tale of desire and violence, as well as the ways in which they are etched into and evoked by our photographic memory.
Text by: Ines Weizman, Graphic Design: Inedition, Eva van der Schans.
Distributed by Idea Books, Edited by Sternthal Books.
