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Herlinde Koelbl: Targets
DEUTSCHES HISTORISCHES MUSEUM
BERLIN
MAY 9-0CT0BER 5, 2014
Martin Roemers: Eyes of War
DEUTSCHES HISTORISCHES MUSEUM
BERLIN
OCTOBER 1, 2014-JANUARY 4, 2015
In 2014, the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) in Berlin showcased a number of exhibitions either commemorating the beginning of World War I in 1914 or examining the consequences and aftermath of war more generally. Two recent exhibitions, Herlinde Koelbl's Targets (2014), and Martin Roemers's Eyes of Wor (2014)1, are photography projects informed by interviews with the victims of war and those trained to perform it. Though only overlapping in the museum for a few days, they worked together to introduce viewers to some little-known effects and mechanisms of military violence. Ultimately concerned with the personal histories and contemporary experiences of war and not chiefly critical of the aesthetics or effects of photography as medium, these exhibitions are firmly embedded in the history of war photography and documentary images, and provide examples of the medium's ability to catalog surface appearances. However, when these photographic images combine with personal narratives and with other images in series form, they probe surfaces and produce striking subjectivities.
Koelbl's Targets, which traveled afterward to the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn2, examines the military target, both literally (in the form of objects used for military training) and figuratively (in the form of the faces of soldiers training for military action and acting as "human targets"). As Koelbl put it, this reality leaves its mark on their faces.5 Or, as one of the quotes on the wall of the exhibition read, "War is the chess game of the politicians and we are the figures."
Koelbl is famous for her large-scale photography projects, including Kleider Machen Leute (2012), Haare (2007), Starke Frauen (1996), and Jüdische Portraits (1989).' The research for Targets took her to nearly thirty countries, where she observed military training, interviewed soldiers and photographed their targets and stage-set cities designed for modern combat training. Spread across several rooms on two levels, the exhibition at the DHM featured numerous images of targets from different countries, dizzying in their variety-some representational and detailed, some painterly, some showing faceless dummies full of pits and holes left by bullets, some merely blunt plinths. One could not determine context without reading the museum labels....