A Time Capsule and Digital Space

The point of departure for this project is the multilingual partial collection on the life and work of the Jewish photographer and visual artist Rita Ostrovska, who was born in Kyiv in 1953 and emigrated to Kassel in 2001. Her archive directs our gaze to developments, transformations, and ruptures since the second half of the twentieth century, specifically: the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, refugee and migration movements in Europe, and the correlating shifts in language and multiple belongings, integration and marginalization, and the omnipresence of antisemitism.

Rita Ostrovska was active in Pogljad (Gaze), a creative association of photographic artists, in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. She directly witnessed the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the independence of Ukraine. Parallel to this, as an expecting mother, she went on a quest to discover her own family background, driven by the question of what the nationality »Jewish« registered on her Soviet passport meant to her personally. From 1989 onward, she traveled through numerous small towns in the southwest of Ukraine, photographing a world that was in the process of disappearing: fragments of Jewish life more than four decades after the Holocaust and immediately before the massive wave of emigration departing the former Soviet Union. This was sparked by the opportunity that the political ruptures of 1989/91 offered to Jews to emigrate to Israel, the USA, or to reunited Germany in the context of the »quota refugee agreement« – an opportunity that Rita Ostrovska finally also seized together with her parents, husband, and son in 2001.

A selection of the analog collection of archival material of this artist, especially photographs, personal documents, and audio cassettes, will initially be incorporated partly in analog, partly in digital form, into the collection of the Deutsche Kunstarchiv (DKA) at the Germanische Nationalmuseum (GNM). By archiving, reviewing, and cataloging these documents and photographs, the GNM will guarantee that the collection will remain permanently housed, secured, and accessible. At the same time, the creation of analog, digital, and audiovisual formats will make the archival collection more visible.