ALFRED ULLRICH (artist, Germany)

Pearls before Swine and Dachau, Landfahrerplatz kein Gewerbe

2000, series of photographs, color, dimensions variable and 2011, installation, traffic sign

Artist Alfred Ullrich’s series of photographs are exhibited as documents of an older performance entitled Pearls before Swine. The original performance took place on 13 May 2000 in the Czech Republic in front of the former Roma concentration camp Lety, which was run solely by Czechs during WWII; since the 1970s, the site has housed a swine farm. The artist threw pearls from a necklace belonging to his sister onto the ground through the farm’s locked gate and in front of the memorial stone in homage to his relatives and other Roma who were interned in various concentration camps. Ullrich’s action and the title of the work point to the absurd and disturbing attempt by the Czech government to overwrite the history and existence of the Lety site, and to erase any public memory related to the concentration camp and the horrors that took place by simply covering it up with a different kind of “dirt,” thus desecrating the memory of Roma who suffered there. Another work by Ullrich, Dachau, Landfahrerplatz kein Gewerbe (2011), consists of a street sign warning that itinerants are not allowed to trade or peddle in the area, but in the work the inscription is crossed out. This simple action highlights how seemingly neutral regulations in fact enforce the segregation of Roma travelers from others. Thus discrimination on the basis of ethnicity is preserved through language and visual public memory, something that gives way to reinforcing the already existing stereotype of Roma people as “exotic” creatures full of wanderlust. (Suzana Milevska)