Griselda Pollock: Allo-Thanatografie oder Allo-Auto-Biografie. UEberlegungen zu einem Bild in Charlotte Salomons Leben. Oder Theater?, 1941/42

With her reading of a selection of works by Charlotte Salomon, Griselda Pollock offers a radically new, non-autobiographical interpretation of the oeuvre of an artist who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943 because she was a Jewish woman. Already in 1940, Charlotte Salomon had been interned in the French concentration camp Gurs, after which experience she began to produce expressionistic gouaches with transparent overlays as a theatre of memory. In only six months between 1941 and 1942 she created an enormous narrative cycle which encompasses 1,325 images and texts as well as musical indications for the singing of the texts. Salomon left the cycle, as a complete work provocatively titled Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theater), in a box with a doctor in Nice. The individual pages provide intimate insight into the cultural and affective world of a nameless person whose sole registration of her status as an artist during her lifetime is to be found on the list deporting her to Auschwitz, and who gained a name-and thereby due recognition as an art maker-only with immense delay.Griselda Pollock (*1949) is Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds, where she is Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art.