Always Glad to be of Service - Art and Forced Labour in the Documentation Centre, Prora, by Andreas Küstermann, Ruegen Newspaper (D) 30.5.2005

Prora. Ifa now has a completely different meaning in Prora, in short the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (not the hotel chain). A new exhibition "Always Glad to be of Service" at the Prora Documentation Centre presents six artists who have made work on the subject of forced labour and the history of industry. Heidi Stern and Tanya Ury made a personal appearance at Prora, together with the curator Barbara Barsch for the opening of the exhibition on Saturday.
Even after 60 years, as in the case of Ernst Heinckel, only recently uncovered here in Germany, buried facts are still being thrown up with the history of industry big names from 1933 to 1945. Forced labour employed by Hugo Boss in Baden-Wuerttemberg to produce SS, SA (Storm Trooper) and Hitler Youth uniforms is a subject that Tanya Ury, who lives in Cologne, takes on with her "sewn object" and installation work. The Hair Shirt awakens associations: it is made out of small plastic bags containing her own hair, collected from natural hair loss with little date tags that have been sewn together. And above all Ury works with the kind of associations that without forewarning the spectator would have to make an effort to open up to.
Heidi Stern, the daughter of Holocaust survivors was first inspired to make work about the Holocaust after seeing a film by the Polish director Dariusz Jablonski. Jablonski found slides of a long forgotten era on a Polish flea market: an SS officer at the time had made propaganda, for the German Army with the latest photographic technology. Jablonski's film "The Photographer" came out of this. Stern models predominantly men's faces and works them into scenes that depict forced labour and war.
Ifa curator Barbara Barsch considers Prora to be a significant place where this kind of exhibition should be shown. "It is an authentic location and much that one could not afford to present in regional areas can be brought there." On being questioned, Barbara Barsch also confirmed she could very well see Prora being made use of more frequently to present exhibitions on the social history of Fascism.

(English translation by Tanya Ury)