Ursula Neugebauer at Kunstraum München

At Kunstraum München, Ursula Neugebauer is showing her „black Snow“ project, which has been progressing since 1998 and for which she has repeatedly traveled to Dzwonów (PL), formerly Schellendorf, the birthplace of her mother, whom she never visited again after fleeing to West Germany in 1945. Neugebauer uses the rooms as a stage on which the individual exhibits interact like props to form an associative memory course: Recordings of conversations can be seen and heard, the village surroundings are performatively a tree slice from the cemetery chestnut tree felled in 2023 serves as a timeline, the historical photo of a young woman – the artist’s mother – in a rowing boat floats fluidly projected in the space, her skirt stands in the way like a model and enters into correspondence with its voluminous up and down and descending „siblings“. With „black Snow“, Ursula Neugebauer succeeds in transposing the subjective approach of this intimate research into a universal, over-private staging and uses her aesthetic vocabulary to confront the audience with concrete questions about the consequences of flight and displacement, the associated physical and psychological devastation of future generations, but also the idea of family, of belonging and self-empowerment in general. Through the constellation of the exhibits and their presence in the media, the artist creates a space for reflection, a temporary memorial that is both sensually and intuitively challenging, but also intellectually challenging and allows for the continuation of their own experiences