Coelestine Engels: Final Solution – Questions

Who are the persons shown at the pictures?

The portraits are showing female fighters of the resistance contrasting pictures of female Nazi collaborators. The background of the pictures is made up by their story, either as part of the Slovenian-Kärtner resistance movement either their active participation in the war machinery of the Nazi.

How you got the pictures of this women or how you choose the women?

Some of them are painted out of my memory on this person, because I knew them in real and others are made after photos. Out of both ways the lightly coloured faces are manifested at the paintings. On the one hand I wanted to face the different sites with each other with the portraits and on the other hand they are all shown in front of the same alpine landscape so you can differentiate between them, who was partisan and who was the Nazi collaborator.

Before you mentioned that some of the pictures come from your memory at the people…that meanst it is also part of your history?

Yes, it is partly a private connection with the topic but also a general confrontation with the question of decision. The personal question came up with the question how the own grandmother behaved during Nazi times…and it was connected with the fact to realize that my own grandmother acted totally different than her best friend. One went after work to the forest to take part in the partisan movement, risking her life, while the other one was working at the airport for the Nazi.

But if history was so important for the pictures or for your decision that is going to be portrayed, why you did not wrote a short description of each women to every painting?

The content is not about the concrete person, but about the thing itself, therefore I wrote only the first name of the women.

Could you describe “the thing itself” a bit more?

The thing itself is first of all the everyday question of decision. In this special case it is the question of how people decided to behave during Nazi times. But the pictures are also made in the very same stile, either it was a partisan or a Nazi collaborator because I think, that it could have been everybody, who had to decide and decide either for one or the other thing. We have to decide every moment and sometimes decisions are more important as in this case shown at the pictures others seem to be more “regular”, but decisions has to be always made and because of a certain circumstance we could have decide totally different than we did, the same with the women at the pictures. So I preferred not to put an explanation down the pictures, because it the commutability should become clear.

To get an impresion of the pictures look at: http://www.kudmreza.org/rdece/artist%20pages/coelestine_eng.html#

Antje Höhne