Miriam Visacki & Claire Waffel

The main theme explored by Miriam Visaczki and Claire Waffel is memory on the personal and historical level. Their latest cooperation, which emerged during their residency at the MeetFactory in Prague, is the installation Dancing with Tears in my Eyes, which is about family history and reception of origin. The centrepiece of this installation is a black box projection of the video Metopia.

This video evolved from an analysis and exploration of works of Miriam’s father Verner V. Visaczki. The two woman artists assembled autobiographical places into 8 chapters: Poběžovice, Prague, Tanvald, Svitávka (Czech Republic), Valbert, Waldmünchen (Germany), London (Great Britain) and Kolomyia (Ukraine).

The starting point of the narration is Poběžovice. The history of this Czech village close to the German border is marked by migration, disfranchisement, extermination and exchange of sections of the population. There are geographical links between the village’s past and the artists’ family history, leading Miriam Visaczki and Claire Waffel to merge them in Metopia..

On the part of Miriam Visaczki there is the history of a Sudeten German family which during the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia collaborated with the Nazi regime and which was expelled after the war. This topic is confronted with the history of Claire Waffel’s ancestors, a Jewish family from Galicia, today’s Ukraine, who had to escape pogroms during WWI in a westward direction and later immigrated to Great Britain.

http://www.miriamvisaczki.de/