In his essay Stations: A Brief Diary of a Long Concern, Gareth Evans writes in response to the body of work Wandelhalle (after Sebald’s Austerlitz) by Karen Stuke commissioned by The Wapping Project in 2013 for one of the final exhibitions – Stuke After Sebald’s Austerlitz (12 October – 11 November 2013) – within the Boiler House and the Coal Store at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. The series of large format pinhole images was restaged at the Kommunale Galerie Berlin in 2019.
In the heat of the hottest day recorded to date in the UK [to date], Gareth creates a text in fragments, weaving lines found online searching for ‘Sebald Austerlitz resonance’ with overheard voices and reflections on language, place, extinction and the state of the world. Every image is a ghost, he writes in the opening. His essay is interspersed with Karen’s ghostly, large format pinhole images that follow the journey of W.G. Sebald’s Jacques Austerlitz uncovering his forgotten past of a Jewish child brought to the UK on a Kindertransport from Prague.
Stations: A Brief Diary of a Long Concern was published in a print publication Resonance 1 on 1 September 2019.