Judith Raum (born 1977) is a Berlin-based artist and author. After many years of artistic research into German economic colonialism in the Ottoman Empire as well as projects connected with notions of textility, she has lately concentrated on the textile workshop at the Bauhaus. Her Bauhaus Space installation is currently part of the ifa touring exhibition The Event of a Thread, and a video on the Bauhaus textile workshop is included in the show Taking a Thread for a Walk at MoMA, New York.
For more information, please see: www.judithraum.net
Judith Raum, Day by Idle Day, 2020. Painted lace net, video projection. Installation view, Kunsthaus Hamburg, as part of the show Futureless Memories. Photo: Hayo Heye
First, and most importantly, how are you doing? How are you navigating the highs and lows?
Looking back at the time since March, when the lockdown began here in Germany, I feel that I was in a quite privileged and lucky situation, both professionally and privately. Right away in March/April, Berlin made it possible for artists to apply for a fee to bridge the loss of salary that many freelancers faced and a state-run institution which I was supposed to do a project for (which had to be postponed of course) payed me an early honorarium because of the difficult situation – so there was major support and responsibility from state level for my practice, which I really appreciate. Since the summer, I have been working on an artistic research project in collaboration with a Berlin-based institution, and receive a honorarium for that job, so I didn’t even have to use the second help for cultural producers and freelancers, which Berlin and the state of Germany issued at the end of the summer.
I have two children, who at the time of the lockdown did not go to school yet but still attended kindergarden. Although it was hard that day care ended from one moment to the next, once the kindergartens closed, I was glad not to face the daily stress and tensions that home-schooling created for many families. We have a cabin in the woods north of Berlin, and as soon as the temperatures rose, I basically spent most of the time out there with the kids. My studio practice was completely on hold, but instead we lived intensely and in close contact with nature; experienced the arrival of spring, lived with the birds whose activities increasingly dominated the surroundings out there. We learned to distinguish their different voices. We found a big injured bird, took care of it, brought it to the animal doctor. It survived. So I would say it was a very intimate, intense time. It was grounding. My perception re-adjusted itself to the sounds and smells of a forest surrounding and to the speed of the forest. We felt very spoiled by these weeks. I hardly took pictures during those weeks and months, the images are stored in my mind, not on the cell phone or camera. So I can’t include images here.
The one thing that I was able to “work on” was to write and hand in a major application for funding for an artistic research project on the Bauhaus weaver Otti Berger. The application requirements were highly formalized, and required precise, detailed explanations of the very peculiarity of my methodology in research-based practice, a requirement of being ‘structured’ that was painful, as it stood in great contrast to our life in the forest, were we experienced a new kind of structuring off the clock, computer and telephone, instead in response with light, weather, atmospheres.
Detail of cotton lace net painted and dyed with pigmented ink for the installation Day by Idle Day, Kunsthaus Hamburg. Photo: Judith Raum
Beginning from September, the pre-Corona stress was back in some way. Exhibitions were happening again, teaching, studio work, research. It felt a bit like catching up with something, and I was breathless at times. I was able to open two shows in September, one of them a group show in the Greek part of Cyprus. Traveling, installation, and opening celebration were all done with masks and strict security regulations, but I was able to do my performance there without the mask. Another opening was at Kunsthaus Hamburg of Day by Idle Day. The production for that show, an installation consisting of many meters of cotton lace net that I dyed and painted, felt like a roller coaster up to the very last moment, because the manufacturer producing the lace net was in part time mode and it took them much longer than usual to get the material to my studio. During that time, I was even able to visit a few permanent exhibitions in museums, and see shows. I have started to remember those visits as something very precious in a situation where all these places are closed again.
After September, things slowed down again considerably. However, I was in the position to keep frequenting Berlin-based archives and continously do my research between August and early November, which, again, was very lucky. Now the institutions are closed again, but I can work in great continuity based on what I took from the archives during those past months. It is also remarkable how reliably and quickly archives and libraries respond to email requests.
All exhibitions that include works of mine are closed at the moment, some that were ment to open in December of course won’t. It is something I feel sorry about, but it can be endured.
What does worry me is the decision in Germany to keep museums closed in order to minimize infections, while letting shops open at the same time. Galleries can remain open – considered a retail place. I find it an unacceptable message: consumption is a necessity, but culture is not.
Visitors inside the installation Bauhausspace at NeMe Arts Center, Limassol, Cyprus, September 2020. Photo: Judith Raum
It's my experience that most artists engage with some level of self-isolation in their day to day art practice. Has this been your experience? And if so, have you found these innate rhythms to be helpful during this larger, world-wide experience of isolation?
Seeing my friends and colleagues less than before was unfamiliar in the beginning, but I have the feeling that when we speak on the phone, we are able to communicate concerns and problems quite intensely. To be honest, the sudden lack of requests and invitations coming in felt, to me, quite relieving in the beginning. The feeling was that I can finally get back to a slower, less hounded rhythm and connect with deeper processes, something I had been missing in the year before, which was a professionally very intense time with lots of traveling. I was almost grateful for this forced ‘stop’. Less or no traveling felt good, also in ecological terms.
The isolation made us look at our home more carefully, and we finally began with a few over-due renovations. In the end, we realized that a few things that always upset us about our place actually had such a strong and negative impact on us, that we decided to find another place. Which we did. So now we are moving. A year full of changes.
It would be great if you could briefly talk us through your practice. Understanding it is integral to appreciating the multivalence of your work.
I have developed a practice where detailed archival research plays a great role. The main concern is to find black holes in specific histories and reconstruct or re-imagine stories and practices that were supressed by more powerful logics. In past projects, I concentrated on a critical reading of German economic colonialism in the Ottoman Empire before World War One, the German conception of Djihad during World War One, or the history of workers’ rebellions in the textile sector. Recently, my concentration has been on the history of the Bauhaus weaving workshop, most importantly on Bauhaus textile designer Otti Berger and her outstanding contribution to modern textile design that is fairly unknown to this day.
Alongside doing research on these topics, often for a couple of years, I have an artistic output in media that you wouldn’t necessarily expect for artistic research: mostly painting, drawing and performance. It is important for me to connect the work of the hand and the body with the discursive level. I do this both in installations, and in lecture/performance formats.
Judith Raum performing harmless entrepeneurs (2012), NeMe Arts Center, Limassol, Cyprus, September 2020. Photo: Nicos Avramides
Has any of your imagery shifted in a reflection to what's currently happening? And why, or why not?
As I said before, I am currently concentrating on understanding the work and life of Bauhaus weaver Otti Berger, who was killed in Auschwitz in 1944. After a professionally very active time from 1932- 1938, she found herself ‘trapped’ in her home village from 1939-1944, the year of her deportation, as she didn’t manage to leave Yugoslavia for the U.S.
Letters testimony how she experienced these years of isolation and unemployment. I feel that the current situation altered my understanding of her experience of those years. During her Berlin years, she is 100% dedicated to experimentation and work on the loom and takes great care of having her inventions in textile patented, making sure that the designs she sells to companies carry her name. Her contacts with a copyright lawyer fill more pages than her contacts with the textile industry. I think that the current situation, where cultural practices are under threat or put in question, throws another light on Berger’s effort to establish a proper professional (and legal) position for herself. Apart from negotiating her artistic means and processes, she invested a lot of time negotiating authorship and payment.
Then, by exterior forces, everything came to a hault. There are no works that survived from her Yugoslav years. In this isolation, letters become the primary means of communication for her. They speak of the painful process of waiting for answers and of dealing with misunderstandings that occur when communication is based on the slow air mail traffic between different continents. I concentrated on this experience of forced exile in my installation Day by Idle Day, which I produced for Kunsthaus Hamburg in September 2020. Next to painted and dyed cotton lace net, a curtain material that Otti Berger worked with during her final years at the Bauhaus, the installation includes two video projections with excerpts from letters that Berger wrote, separated from her partner Ludwig Hilberseimer and from friends.
Installing Day by Idle Day, Kunsthaus Hamburg, September 2020. Photo: Judith Raum
What is bringing you solace, or even joy, in this moment?
The Bauhaus-Archive Berlin signed a contract with me this year to collaborate on a longer research and publication project on Otti Berger. I hoped for this alliance for many years, and I am very grateful that it is now happening. It means not only financial security, but most importantly it creates an artistic and scholarly space of exchange on Otti Berger that is institutionally backed. Something her work so much deserves. This development also gives me satisfaction, as it proves that a direction I decided for in the past (and that I was unsure about at times) was right: basing my artistic practice more on cooperations with (state-)institutions and keeping more or less outside the art market.
Are you reading anything?
When Covid 19 started to become big here, around March/April 2020, I ordered and read quite a few things that were reviewed in the cultural and economic sections of the newspapers: contributions on alternative economies, post-growth society, mutual solidarity, ecology.
I now turned to books that link more with my current research on Otti Berger, such as novels that are located in the 1930s, the end of the Weimar Republic and the coming into power of National Socialism in Germany, in order to get a better feeling for the cultural and political atmosphere in which Berger lived and worked.
Judith Raum, Discussion of Material, 2019. Installation view Grassi Museum Leipzig. Photo: Ludger Paffrath.