Literature/Documenting The Past

From Partition To Nakbah, Memories Of Home
From childhood memories to national identities, Sophie Ernst’s book HOME explores what the idea of home represents to people who have been forced to leave their homes behind. It also deciphers how artists, filmmakers and writers remembered the places they had left behind during the 1947 India-Pakistan partition and examines the architectural memories of Muslim, Christian and Jewish Arabs living in Palestine and Israel. An excerpt from HOME

From Partition To Nakbah, Memories Of Home

Published by: Outlook Magazine
New Delhi, India, 2023
Language: English

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Israel/ Memories

“I have loved my people with a love that dominated all my sentiments and believed deeply and unreservedly in the fraternity of all peoples.”

—Words inscribed on the tombstone of Emile Touma (1919-1985)

In this conversation with Sophie Ernst, a visual artist who explores architecture in relation to memory and cultural relativity in works that mix video projection and sculptural installation, Haya, who was also a prominent artist, talks about the childhood home of her husband Emile in Haifa. Unfortunately, Haya passed away in 2009, soon after their meeting.

These are edited excerpts from that conversation where Haya talks about home, memories, belonging, displacement and identity…

The Sophie Ernst-Haya Touma interview

Published by: Outlook Magazine
New Delhi, India, 2023
Language: English

Article

Apology and ‘Eingedenken’

To apologise, some say it is a free ticket to forget. I argue, on the other hand, that an apology is a form of Eingedenken.

During the first LOSS workshop on the 22 of September 2018 at the University of Westminster I spoke about a public intervention in Wakefield, the Silent Empress (2012)1 . In my talk I summarised what motivated me to make the Silent Empress. I proposed that the work is a form of ‘Eingedenken’. ‘Eingedenken’ is a productive process; remembering the past in its present-day meaning. During the discussion we touched on the subject of apology several times. Some pointed out apologies often are insincere, commodified, or otherwise flawed. I shall repeat my ideas on the Silent Empress here, and add a short note on the concept of apology.

Apology and 'Eingedenken'

Publisher: Stuart Hall Foundation
London, United Kingdom, 2019
Language: English
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Graphical conversations of HOME: Performing Landscape

This paper considers landscape as a process, and focuses on drawing,mapping, and storytelling as performative actions. It takes the HOME projectas a case study, and demonstrates how images of landscape reveal, and also create, power relations. For the HOME project, artists, architects, and writers from Pakistan, India, Israel, and Palestine draw maps and vistas of places they once called home and were forced to leave. They do not point out thebeauty of the landscape, but rather emphasize their claim to memories of aparticular place. In this multifaceted artistic research project I look at how memories of specific topographies relate to identity and political claims. In particular, I view the act of drawing as an instrument of holding a graphical conversation with history.

Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference

ISSN: 2214-191x
Publisher: Leiden University Library
Leiden, The Netherlands, 2018
Language: English
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Polemical Position -  Idealized Enclosures: Three Spatial Possibilities Around the Idea of the Exhibition

There are some things we know about the idea of the exhibition and some things we may not know. For instance, we know the modern exhibition emerged from the French salon. People represent the salon as a space in which to gather, look at art, and talk about art. Marcel Proust showed that a salon was part of a public sphere. For Proust, the salon was an institution for ideological elaboration and social stratification. But do we know precisely why this salon culture survived massive technological and ideological transformations?

I often work with the notion of ideal space in my practice, and here I approach the idea of an exhibition with a set of questions anchored around space. The most basic question is: What constitutes the space of an exhibition? The space of every exhibition may be unique, but what spatial properties are common to all exhibitions? What does the space of an exhibition represent? And what comes to mind when we think about the exhibition as an ideal space? If the exhibition is an ideal space, what does it idealize? In the following, I look at three spatial possibilities around the idea of the exhibition.

Yishu, Journal of Conteporary Chinese Art

Volume 13, number 2, March/April 2014
ISSN: 1683-3082
Publisher: Art & Collection Group
Taipei, Taiwan, 2014
Language: English

OEVRE: Sophie Ernst

TAKE OEVRE brings together a spectrum of artists reflecting their artistic practice. Dayanita Singh, Jitish Kallat, Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi, Ranbir Kaleka, Rashi Kaleka, Ritas Kou, Thukral & Tagra, Pooja Iranni, Yamini Nayar, Pors & Rao, Sarnath Banerjee, Raqs Media Collective, T.V. Santhosh and Subodh Gupta have contributed pages in which they open their sketchbooks, offer a glimpse at traces of thoughts that come during the course of the process of creating an artwork ...

Take on Art

Vol. 1, Issue 4, 2011
ISSN: 0976-4011
Guest Editor: Sophie Ernst
Publisher: Take on art Publishing
New Delhi, India, 2011
Language: English

Konfiguration des Raums

Ist Kunst politisch? Ist meine Kunst politisch? Was ist eigentlich 'politische Kunst'? Aktivismus? Gesellschaftskritik? Oder sogar sozialer Realismus? Propaganda? Utopie? Diese Fragen zur Beziehung zwischen Kunst und Politik, und wie sich das in meiner Arbeit widerspiegelt, beschäftigen mich im folgenden Text.

Eine Art Aufruhr: Aktuelle Kunst in Position zu Politik

Exhibition Catalogue
Publisher: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung
Bonn, Germany, 2011
Language: German
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