This video collage mounted on U-Matic is one of my first artistic works at the beginning of my studies at the HfBK Hamburg. A visit to the Kupferstichkabinett of the Hamburger Kunsthalle drew my attention to a drawing by Gerhard Marcks. A haunting look from this self-portrait opened a search for this artist, who was previously unknown to me.
The path led to the Ohlsdorf Cemetery, an impressive and enormous place of transience, so quietly asserted in the middle of the city. It was winter, like in Hamburg, Rügen; snow and the cracking cold accompanied me through the park cemetery to the memorial for the victims of Operation Gomora, the firestorm on the workers‘ quarters, and the port area in July 1943. Despite the anonymity, it is an impressive, frightening place, a mass grave made of the dust of the neighborhoods, decorated with individual graves and crosses. In the middle of everything, a centered block of stone, monumental and rough. Entrance Exit, Michael Kress, VG Bildkunst, 1987
The piles of corpse dust end in a cross shape on this one, a centering as a clear statement to commemorate the victims, who can also be called perpetrators. In the middle of everything, the ship that takes us across the Harder promises comfort and eternity. My mother had just died in the summer of 1986 and gave me a desperate attraction to everything that death inexplicably does to you, demands of you. The preoccupation with remembrance, guilt, responsibility, powerlessness, and forgetting led me to study the most diverse sources and images. The video is a compilation of photographs, my first and only oil painting, and Super 8 film recordings in time-lapse mode.
Filmed and edited in 1987, I had not shown this first work to anyone for a long time. I can guess why.
In memory of Kurd Alsleben, my first teacher at the HfBK.