Kristian Skylstad’s photo series Sighs was photographed in Silesia, a historic region in East Central Europe. Skylstad has taken pictures from the Polish part of the area, where German bombs killed a large number of civilians and destroyed buildings and infrastructure during World War II. In addition the area has many ruins from the Soviet era, abandoned factories and vacated private homes. Skylstad has been preoccupied with finding the mental state that still prevails in these places with links to the sombre past.
This publication arose as a remake of Skylstad’s exhibition of the same name – now “shuffled” into a collage by Verena Winkelmann. Pictures in colour and black-and-white have been edited together. The photo series exploits the ability of photography to make absence more present, and the composition creates a picture suite that attempts to counteract stereotyping and direct representation. Blacked-out statues appear mute and sightless against the sky, a grainy view shows a cemetery that overlaps with heavy industry, graffiti piles out of a subway. An exhibition dummy, fashioned in a lost decade, is decorously rigid. There is an unmistakable melancholy here, arranged in accordance with a poetic ambivalence. The history of the place is uncovered through vague visual and atmospheric connections, and Skylstad seeks to convey something that is actually aesthetically incommunicable. How is one to conjure up the formative past?
