This exhibition focused on the works that Schorr has produced over the last two decades in a town in southern Germany, Schwäbisch Gmünd. Over time, Schorr became increasingly integrated into the life of the community, exploring its daily existence, its cultural traits and its psychosocial idiosyncrasies. What she produced is a portrait of a place created through the assembling of different subjects that include people, places, objects and landscape moments. The images suggest intertwined themes and stories in a land where the (un)awareness of time and history hang like a shadow over daily experience. [...]
In this context, Schorr combines the role of photographer with those of social anthropologist, psychoanalyst and storyteller, in a work that feeds off the psychic wanderings between legibility and illegibility, documental observation and mental figuration. As such, the images are located in a time that is simultaneously suspended and dilated, in which past and present are tied together, which also functions to suggest nostalgia, tension, drama, anxiety and trauma. This is a place marked by memory, by war and nationalism, by emigration and social reconstruction; it is, in other words, a reality determined by time, which the artist attempts to examine in order to unearth their psychic and social effects. In fact, more than seeking the vestiges of war, what Schorr does is to represent a vernacular reality, a bucolic world waiting to be regenerated, resolved and its history made tolerable. Consequently, the town and the German faces represent a metaphor for post-war Germany, a society trapped in its own history. But we are also aware of a more general sweep, in the broad reflection on the relationship between image and historical inheritance and a critical polemicisation of the iconic and its cultural and political implications.
Sérgio Mah