Jürgen Kisters, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger

Tanya Ury, Hochbunker Cologne-Ehrenfeld till 10.11.2002

In the Chapter of Moses of the bible, Jacob dreamt of a ladder which rested on the ground with its top reaching to heaven and angels of God going up an down it. Twenty years later he again had a vision. He wrestled with an angel and would not let him go; as dawn was breaking he said: "I will not let you go unless you bless me." The image of the ladder to heaven and the fight with the angel were the frame of reference for a six-year project that the artist Tanya Ury is now presenting in the Hochbunker, Körner Strasse, Ehrenfeld. Themes are (a Roman Svastika in an antique shop vitrine,) Neo-nazis, traffic street signs covered in graffiti, misconceptions, erogenous zones and the English board game Snakes and Ladders.

Most importantly it's about the actualisation of the past in memory and the recognition, that in the personal, as in collective history, nothing really goes missing. "Can you get away from the identity that you were born with?" asks the artist who was born in London, 1951 to German Jewish emigrants. It wasn't until she was 37 years old that she felt she could develop her own voice as an artist. Since then, in telling her own personal history she has managed to free herself from the problems of fixed and given parameters. That means allowing one's memory to be jogged, looking for leads everywhere in the everyday and looking out for signs that will allow you a cautious (re)-interpretation.

Those are little swastikas and Stars of David you see as graffiti on the traffic signs along a street in Mallorca that is ultimately being widened in the interests of German tourists. Against the background of the forced labour compensation issue, this is a glance at the hidden fashion continuity of the clothing empire Hugo Boss, who still put their money on the look of the "dark angel" and the robes of intimidation that brought them so much success as a fashion concept during the imperial state of the Third Reich, when they were the contracted producers of SA (Storm Trooper) and SS uniforms. And that is the bringing together of the image of a Spanish Peseta coin, (a swastika has been carved into the portrait of General Franco) and a press photo of a disabled German teenager who scratched a swastika onto her own cheek, and then claimed that she had been attacked by skinheads. The stifling atmosphere aroused by the intellectual clarity of this ensemble of Photographs, videos, neon-sign writing and newspaper articles is inevitable. The feeling is heightened by the atmosphere of the bunker, where the fear and oppression of the National Socialist past is still a palpable, almost bodily presence.

Hochbunker, Körner Strasse 101, Fri - Sun 15-19 PM, till 10.11.2002
(Translation from German, Tanya Ury