Passage works
Ruth Beckermann's art
By Patricia Allmer and John Sears
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- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 336
- Price: £85.00
- Published Date: February 2025
Description
Passage Works is the first book-length English language critical analysis of the transdisciplinary work of the Austrian film-maker, writer, and artist Ruth Beckermann (b. 1952, Vienna). Beckermann's works interrogate identity and geography as formations of the intersections between the past and the contemporary. Taking as her central topics Austria and its history and politics, her own identity as a Jewish woman, and the contemporary global geopolitics of migration and displacement, Beckermann develops wider meditations in film, art, and writing on the persistence of European memory, and the meanings of Europe itself; on borders, migrations, and identities; on memories, traumas, and traditions; on the image as marker of presence and absence, repository of the traces of historical violence; and on the passage as metaphor for a range of physical, psychological, and ideological movements defining the complexities of contemporary cosmopolitan identities.
Contents
Introduction: "One possible way to start"
1 Politics and history - early films
2 From memory to history - Return to Vienna and Die Mazzesinsel
3 Diaspora or nation - Paper Bridge and Towards Jerusalem
4 Intolerable images - East of War and The Waldheim Waltz
5 Home as constellation of mobility - A Fleeting Passage to the Orient
6 Home, ritual, life - homemad(e), Zorro's Bar Mitzvah, and Leben!
7 Threads and traces - American Passages and Those who Go Those who Stay
8 Where fascism begins - The Dreamed Ones, MUTZENBACHER, and The Missing Image
Index
Authors
Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh
John Sears is a freelance scholar