Oscar Lebeck
Freilegung (Uncovering)

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Using a wide-angle lens, Oscar Lebeck recorded the uncovering of foundations in the middle of a forest landscape on the Western edge of Berlin-Spandau. The video shows how the artist, dressed as a gardener, frees the floor of a barrack of the Falkensee subcamp from a dense cover of vegetation. The camp, built by prisoners, housed around 2,000 men during the National Socialist era who were sent to the Deutsche Maschinen AG (DEMAG) factories for forced labour in the production of weapons. The black-and-white video highlights different levels of remembrance and commemoration. In the course of Lebeck’s video, not only do the foundations of the camp become visible again and can thus be perceived more clearly, but the neglect of the site is also brought to light. The degree of neglect of the memorial site refers to a centralised culture of remembrance in Germany, whose focus is often on places where the National Socialists assassinated a large number of people. Places with lesser-known crimes often receive little attention. After the uncovering by the artist, the visibility of the foundations is restored. His actions in the video make the topography of the camp more conceivable again on the basis of the foundations. The process of uncovering thus becomes a form of remembering and commemorating.

Another media-reflexive work are Lebeck’s pigment prints entitled Groß-Rosen. For his discourse on the Groß-Rosen concentration camp, located near a stone quarry in today’s Poland, the artist works with superimpositions. He produced models of the barracks that no longer exist, which he then made visible in the real landscape with the help of a double exposure. This way, the topography of the camp as well as the size and shape of the buildings in the landscape become apparent. Thus, Lebeck makes use of the technical possibilities of photography as a form of reminiscent presentation. In his 1980 publication Die helle Kammer (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography), Roland Barthes summarises the essence of photography as the ability to depict a „that-has-been“. According to Barthes, photography always shows a scene or an object that was actually in front of the camera, and thus determines the relationship between the subject, the photographer and the recipient. Although Lebeck composes his motifs with the help of the models and the double exposure, thus creating a scene that is no longer real in this way, Barthes‘ statement „Photography cannot deny that the thing was there“ precisely characterises Lebeck’s series. For with his superimposed models, the existence of the now disappeared barracks, and thus everyday life for many prisoners in the Nazi regime, is brought back to consciousness. With the help of the superimposition, Lebeck takes photography back to its very essence in the sense of Barthes. At the same time, he shows how commemoration and the media properties of photography are intertwined.

In Germany, remembering and commemorating are essential foundations of the democratic self-image. In his performative video work and in his photographs, the artist shows the specific possibilities of art to make historical events tangible and to bring the past into the present. In the process, dealing with different temporal layers of remembrance is part of his pictorial reflections.

Text: Dr. Silke Förschler

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Oscar Lebeck

Oscar Lebeck was born in Hamburg in 1993 and studied at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts as well as at the Glasgow School of Art. His work is concerned with the representation and visualization of traces of history; for example, he reconstructed the cult spaces of ancient temple sites for his most recent solo exhibition at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig. With his work, he investigates the perception of places steeped in history and stimulates thought about the versatility of the representation of structural relics.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oscar_lebeck/