Learning to Swim() {
  Siegerehrungen;
} //2003

The work "Siegerehrungen" (Presentation Ceremony), realized together with the photographer Tina Bara, consists of 10 large format, full-figure portrait photographs of female swimmers, who were, between the 50s and 70s, very young, successful, professional sportswomen of the German Democratic Republic. To aid the understanding of the context, the work is supplemented by a scrolling LED-display showing factual information (name, times, distances) relating to these very short-lived careers.

The work is about time, memory, success and body politics. We asked the women to stand on the starting blocks of Leipzig's training pool, in the pose they had had to assume at presentation ceremonies during their time as professional sportswomen and, while posing, to remember these moments. Despite their time worn bodies, the women, aged between 40 and 66, responded positively to our request of posing in modern bathing costumes.

Behind the erect, standing women is the calm surface of the water stretching out over the lanes. The space and the costumes were processed digitally. They lend the women support and confirmation, while contrasting with the sensitive, moved surface of the skin, carefully rendered in the day-light of the indoor pool. The parts of the image are subtly treated, for thematic reasons, with various aesthetics of focus and colour. As unchanging background, the interior of the indoor pool is, as opposed to the people portrayed, devoid of the momentary and of motion, thus becoming a universal surface for recollection. The intensely colourful, red, synthetic bathing costumes, bearing logos incise, with their market-orientated presence, the naturally modulated skin of the individual, fleeting human existences.

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