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Stuke, After Sebald’s Austerlitz
Karen Stuke (12 October to 10 November 2013)

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald is one of literature’s most haunting meditations on time, loss and retrieval. It tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who, aged five, in 1939, was sent to England on the Kindertransport from Prague and placed with foster parents in Wales. As he rediscovers his past, Austerlitz embarks on a journey through time and space, from mid-twentieth century mitte-Europa to contemporary England.

Karen Stuke, a Berlin-based photographer, followed this journey, cross-referencing information from the book with maps and records. At the crossroad between fact and fiction, she found, when they existed, the places of Austerlitz’s story: the Prague gymnasium from which his mother was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, the railway journey followed by the Kindertransport, his house in Mile End.

The resulting photographs, all taken with a handcrafted pinhole camera, are the work of light, time and memory. Elusive images created by aggregated traces of light, they evoke fuzzy memories, and justly lend themselves to both the layers and recesses of Austerlitz’s mind and Sebalds’ narrative.

This body of work was subsequently exhibited as Wandelhalle at the Kommunale Galerie Berlin in 2019


Karen Stuke completed her studies in Photo and Film Design at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences. She took her first theatre photograph in the 1990s. Animated by the desire to capture the spirit of the play and its unfolding in time and space, she used a pinhole camera and decided to expose a whole performance in a single photograph. Since then, Stuke has earned an international reputation as an expert on the pinhole photography and collaborated with some of the most prestigious directors and theatres including Gottfried Pilz at the Vienna State Opera, Oper Leipzig, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Oper der Stadt Köln, Opéra Comique Paris and the Los Angeles Opera. She founded her own project space called Kronenboden in Berlin, where she focuses primarily on the intersections between visual and performing arts.