Starting on 25 October 2024, the New Gallery for Contemporary Art in Häselburg Gera will present the annual exhibition Amnesia Gera. Aenne Biermann – Heidi Specker. The exhibition is the result of an intensive artistic research project by Berlin-based artist and photography professor Heidi Specker, who, as part of a Hertie work fellowship at Häselburg Gera in 2023, explored the biography and oeuvre of the Gera avant-garde photographer Aenne Biermann (1898–1933).

Specker’s research examined not only Biermann’s photographic work but also the fate of her body of work: in 1940, during the Biermann family’s flight to Palestine, 4,000 negatives were confiscated by the Nazis in Trieste. Only about 300 original prints, developed by Biermann herself, survive today in international museums. From this loss, Specker approaches Biermann’s work with great sensitivity. The result is fifty new photographs that both engage with Biermann’s oeuvre and act as agents of remembrance for her. In the exhibition, Specker’s new photographs are juxtaposed with Biermann’s original works.

Specker understands her artistic engagement with Biermann as an act of memory: she not only visited various archives housing Biermann’s surviving photographs but also conducted on-site research in her hometown of Gera. In addition to the photographs, the exhibition presents the gravestone and the interior furnishings of Biermann’s ladies’ room, designed by the renowned Gera architect Thilo Schoder according to Biermann’s wishes, as testimonies of her existence in Gera.

These furnishings, previously stored in the attic of the Museum of Applied Arts Gera, are now integrated into the exhibition. They serve as a projection surface for a new film by Specker. Through this “recontextualization” and the use of the furniture as a projection surface, the exhibition becomes both an archive and a symbol of loss and remembrance.