2 channel video installation, color, sound, 15:58 min, 2021
Tying personal memories or everyday local histories together with archival materials
and research is typical to Winkler’s artistic approach. These layers find an additional
expression in a literary form, where actual as well as fictionalized dialogues accompany
her filmed and photographed tracings. This partly speculative approach is central to her current project you cannot trust the colors, which she started researching and allows her to deconstruct the dominant gaze, and its imagery.
Winkler collected image material from the archive of the Rhenish Missionary Society in Wuppertal, primarily private pictures taken by missionaries that have been active in Sumatra, Namibia, Tanzania, and many other countries, predating or accompanying colonization. The pictures attest to an exoticizing, generalizing approach towards the people they portray, deeply influenced by the photographers’ own conception of the “Other”; their subjects are all uniformly represented, ignoring their diverse backgrounds. Not only does the subjects’ forced positioning as an objectified “Other” in the image’s center, but even more so, the fact that the images were recorded on a glass positive in the beginnings of photography, which had to be meticulously colored by hand later, contribute to this representation.
Winkler devotes her research to this process, yet without reproducing the derogatory impact that the images had, and still have. Instead, she looks at the photographs’ margins—to the outside from which the photographers violently took possession of their subjects. These include not only the missionaries‘ dwellings, which can be seen in the background, but also traces of the coloring process, which show how little this process can be trusted: we can observe that several colors were tried to emulate the figure’s skin tone from their blotted remains on the image’s frame.
Winkler inquires into the preconceptions and points of view that these colors were based on, whether conversations took place between missionaries, colonizing powers, and photographic institutions about the hand-coloring process of the glass positives, and how these colors were described. Most importantly, however, she counters the production of the stereotypical images with dialogues that deal with the experiences and memories of people who are still affected by colonial violence. Winkler thus once again takes a certain form of historical narratives as an occasion
to question of how social conditions structure representation—and how, in the process, critical voices may be heard. (Text: Michaela Richter, n.b.k.Berlin)