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