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The opening of the exhibition titled Tell me about yesterday tomorrow is in full swing, and with the big crowd, it isn’t easy at first to pick out a face that is only familiar from pictures. My talk with Andrea Büttner starts amid the bustle of the opening.

One thing I especially like about Büttner’s video work Karmel Dachau is that it forges a link between the past and present. Created in 2019, the work shows the Heilig Blut Carmelite convent, which was founded next to the Dachau concentration camp memorial site in 1964. Büttner talked to the nuns and learned a lot about their views and experiences. The Carmelite order had specifically sought out the location, near the memorial marking the site of the Dachau concentration camp, in order to create a place of peace. They also intended it as tribute to the memory of members of the church who were imprisoned and killed at Dachau.

What inspired you to create this work? How did you decide to use this place as your subject?

“I had been planning to work on this convent next to the concentration camp memorial for a long time. I had the idea for the documenta back in 2012, and the exhibition at the Documentation Centre in Munich was an opportunity to make it a reality. But I also have a personal history that connects me to this place. I’ve been coming here ever since I was a child, and it was always an important spot for me. And, of course, it was a strange place as well, both beautiful and unsettling. The convent is a place that has a deep connection with the history of the German culture of remembrance, and one where you can also see the history of that culture. Since the nuns have been there since the 1960s, the convent has layers of history from different decades, like how people thought and talked about the Nazi era. The video also shows the typical German phenomenon of reversing the role of the victim, for example.”

The Documentation Centre is different from conventional exhibition spaces due to its thematic focus, location, and architecture. Art museums in particular, with the aesthetic and visual neutrality they take on through the ‘white cubes’ phenomenon, are a kind of protective space for the objects – an aspect that the Documentation Centre doesn’t have. Do you see that as a disruptive factor, or more as a complementary aspect on both sides? How do you see the relationship between your work and the permanent exhibition?

“I think it’s interesting to ask what makes up this context. First, there’s the fact that it’s aimed at different audiences, and that’s true of both the art exhibition and the historical one. But it also changes the art and the historical exhibition as well. That’s where I wonder how it changes the historical exhibition, and what I really think about it.”

One last question: What do you want to achieve with your art, and what audience is it aimed at?

“The starting point for me to explore a subject is that I want to find something out, to see something more clearly. After that, other people can participate in the process. I don’t start out aiming to achieve a certain effect, definitely not. What interests me and motivates me to create a work is always something highly specific. Art is highly specific just in general. But my art isn’t aimed at a certain audience. It’s there for everyone.”

I found the talk with Andrea Büttner to be very rewarding. The relationship between suppression and remembrance is an important part of her video work, along with the question of how these memories are handled today. And that topic leads in turn to the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, which is a suitable venue for showing this video work.

Büttner compares her artistic work to the process of writing a scholarly text, an analogy that is also reflected in the juxtaposition of Tell me about yesterday tomorrow and the permanent exhibition featured at the Munich Documentation Centre.

By Isabel Sophie Oberländer, a student of art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich