Ida Kammerloch &
A search movement between personal family history and collective experience.
Since 2021, Ida Kammerloch has been delving deep into her grandfather’s travel and home video archive from the 1990s, with the aim of tracing her own (family) history. The focus is on Aren’t you afraid to swing on Russian swings?, a film about her grandfather and the transformation of the previous socialist way of life through the encounter with new, capitalist dictates. Perestroika made new forms of commerce possible, meaning that people from all segments of the population could travel abroad, often for the first time, to purchase goods and sell them at a profit at home. Her grandparents thus also became travelling merchants after losing their jobs. For more than 13 years, her grandfather imported toys, stuffed animals and counterfeit brand clothing from China. He passionately documented his around 33 business trips and captured the dynamic as well as the clash of hopes, make-shift solutions and economic pragmatism of post-Soviet society.
Kammerloch shows an assemblage of works that originated in her involvement with the archive, and in doing so conducts a stocktaking 30 years later. The material of her grandfather enters into a dialogue with her own film recordings of her trip to the Yiwu Wholesale Market in China—the epicentre of modern commerce. With her photogram series Membrane of the new, she ultimately introduces another medium, in that she transforms the empty plastic packaging of toys into a series of ghostly photograms. A self-referential commentary—the mass product becomes a unique object.
The artist is able to address structural themes by way of the personal level: the situation of Russia in the 1990s, the trade relations with China and political developments to the present day. Her work thus becomes a complex narrative about identity, loss and adaptation. (Fabienne Bonus)
