Pia Pollmanns: Die Wege der Elisa Kosch

A photographic research

In her first publication, Pia Pollmanns combines the story of her grandmother Elisa Kosch with photographic research in the former district of Neumarkt near Breslau. Her grandmother's report, which she produced for family use, tells a sober and unsentimental story of rural life in the Silesian province and of the expulsion of the Germans as a result of the Second World War and Poland's shift to the west by the victorious powers. Pia Pollmanns' pictures are as sober as her grandmother's text in depicting the present, which is still strongly characterised by agriculture, with the EU-standard dreariness of desert farming and the equally well-known decay of the large estates. The impressively portrayed landscape of post-socialist character now corresponds to that of the "western" non-places, where the same mix of the industrial perfection of cultivation and the decay of rural traditions and village structures prevails everywhere.

Exhibition:
Delmenhorst Municipal Gallery, 22/11/2019 - 15/3/2020