July 14, 2024
12 pm

In the “New Insights” tours, artists guide visitors to their works in the exhibition Soft Power, providing insights into their creative processes and discussing the thematic links between art and society with experts. The discussion tours will be moderated by exhibition curator Daniel Milnes.

In her series PICTURES AS A PROMISE (p.a.a.p), which has been running since 2022, Ramona Schacht focuses on the working conditions of women in the textile industry in socialist countries.

She has cropped the historical photographs from archives, including from the Leipzig cotton mill as a VEB (state-owned enterprise) in the GDR, so that details are brought into focus. They are recurring gestures and snapshots that expose certain hierarchies and aspects of the exercise of power in textile production, but also show moments of solidarity.

In the exhibition Soft Power, Schacht presents her work Archive of Female Work and her pictures from the section Gentle Hands - a series of knowing, watchful and careful hands that radiate a lightness and grace that stands in stark contrast to the hard physical labour of women. Staged as equal labourers in a socialist planned economy and a constantly repeated attribution of textile work with female connotations, Schacht questions these pictorial strategies in her work.

Together with the exhibition curator Daniel Milnes, she talks about the ideas and ideologies that the industrial photographs were intended to convey and analyses the promises they made to the workers in the light of today's knowledge.