Professor Marion Ackermann
Laudatio for Paula Doepfner, Winner of the Hans Platschek Prize for Art and Text

Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed guests, I feel very honoured to be here. I’d like to extend my thanks to Frau Wirtz, Frau Blaß and Herr Jarmuschek, and many thanks, of course, to Frau Groenewold and Herr Groenewold. Please also convey my thanks to Bettina Steinbrügge, who sadly can’t be here. Thank you for the invitation to serve as juror of the Hans Platschek Prize. Of course, I’m particularly pleased that Paula Doepfner is able to be with us in person, and also that she’s made new work for the stand here at art Karlsruhe.

There’s something very personal about this part of the prize. We’ve already heard that choosing an artist is an entirely personal affair, and I think that choice gives rise to a very special, quite intense sort of relationship. I first encountered Paula Doepfner’s work in the Study Room at the Kupferstich-Kabinett, our Museum of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. That was just a few months ago. Our Study Room is a very special place. It’s democratic in that it’s open to everyone. There’s no entrance fee. You just buzz and they let you in. There’s still a bit of work to do once you get inside – you first have to immerse yourself in the rich catalogue of the Kupferstich-Kabinett – but then you receive the precious originals you’ve requested, the greatest treasures of art history brought out for your personal consultation. As you all know, the works are then placed on small table-top easels to be studied at close quarters. It was here that I saw Paula Doepfner’s works hanging on the walls. So I discovered them in our own building, so to speak, and I was immediately captivated by them.

The first thing I noticed was how delicate the drawings are. From a distance they seem to resist visual comprehension. As I came closer I perceived their beauty and lightness, a sense of suspension, even enigma. My attempts to identify figurative elements led nowhere. Though they seem quietly evocative of clouds, branches or landscapes, they’re not figurative representations of any of these things. Moving a step closer I saw that the lines were broken, not smooth and continuous but constantly stopping and starting, like a stuttering line. It’s only when you get really close up that you realise these marks are letters, deftly placed block letters, inked with the finest possible pen and strung together into gossamer-thin lines that converge and condense at the intersections, producing a vein-like reticulation of the entire image surface. So on closer inspection they’re not actually lines at all, it’s script. And the script turns out to be legible text. But what do these miniature letters signify? They’re so small that you need a magnifying glass to see them. In the dense areas where the letters are amassed and superimposed you find yourself asking how you’re supposed to read them without a magnifying glass. But as you look more closely the letters can be strung together into words, and from there woven into whole sentences. The dark aura that surrounds them soon dissipates. At this point you’re still a long way from consistent legibility, even though you’re on the right lines and beginning to discern the direction of reading. You get caught up in it, drawn into the image, there’s a tug of resistance. This phenomenon is familiar from early abstraction, for instance, when objects became dissociated from their corresponding ciphers. The letters are put down with extreme precision, and this reminds me of calligraphy, perhaps Japanese calligraphy, in which, after a long preparatory process, perfect characters are drawn directly and with total control.

It was significant that the opening of the exhibition ‘Paula Doepfner – Darkness at the break of noon’ at the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden fell on the ninetieth anniversary of Kristallnacht. The systematic persecution of the Jews in Germany, culminating just a few years later in the largest and most horrific mass murder in human history, is a recurring theme in Paula Doepfner’s work. At the same time, it’s the part of her practice that connects her to Hans Platschek. His grandparents, his aunt, her husband and their children all fell victim to the Nazis. Along with his parents and younger brother, Platschek himself escaped to Uruguay, where he grew up in Montevideo. The resurgence of antisemitism and right-wing extremism in Germany, as in other parts of the world, shows how vitally important it is that we seek to address this subject. I don’t think there can be many artists whose work adopts multiple temporal perspectives simultaneously, but Paula Doepfner is one of them. Both her drawings and her sculptures evidence profound engagement with the past, they speak to us in the present, they give us pause and prompt us to consider how we might act in the future, when the very foundations of our democracy will be severely challenged.

So when I decided to honour Paula Doepfner with the Hans Platschek Prize I did so with great conviction. Paula Doepfner was born in West Berlin in 1980. From 2002 to 2008 she studied fine art at the Universität der Künste in Berlin and at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Since then she’s participated in dozens of exhibitions in Europe and the United States, with fifteen solo exhibitions since 2005. In 2015 she was artist in residence at the Goethe-Institut in Washington, DC, and in 2021/22 she was recipient of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s Else Heiliger Stipend, to mention just two of her accolades. In 2008 she completed her studies in the masterclass of Rebecca Horn. When we’re made aware of this we also find that there’s a similar ambivalence in the work of both these artists, a co-existence of fragility and brutality. When Paula Doepfner was still a student it was Rebecca Horn who recommended that she should address the Shoah in her work. ‘But at that point I didn’t really feel ready for it,’ says Paula Doepfner. ‘If you want to deal with a subject like that at all, you need to be really well prepared. I wanted to have seen all the sites and to have read everything I could.’

Anyone who takes the time to engage with Paula Doepfner’s work will recognise the profound dedication with which she has applied herself to this subject, and that she was very well prepared. Her drawings speak a language with many registers. They take events from the past, show them to us in the present and thus inevitably influence our future actions. The sources of these text-based drawings come to Paula Doepfner from various directions. She’s been given permission to attend neurosurgical operations at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, where she sketches patients’ neural pathways as they’re revealed by the surgeons. These works are a starting point. The next step is to transform the neural networks into text. On translucent, gossamer-thin gampi paper – a paper made from the fibres of the eponymous Japanese shrub – Paula Doepfner draws texts with a pen that has a tip just 0.1mm thick, the finest point available. The fact that the texts resist easy legibility is a barrier that has to be consciously overcome before what’s hidden can be known. As Paula Doepfner herself says, the texts convey content that’s often hard to bear. They’re about torture and human suffering, things that are difficult to put into words.

In the works I got nothing, Ma, to live up to and Darkness at the break of noon – both titles being quotations from Bob Dylan’s song ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ – Paula Doepfner deals with Alwin Meyer’s book Never Forget Your Name: The Children of Auschwitz. This book contains first-person accounts from those who survived the murderous apparatus of the Nazi regime as children, often the sole survivors of their families. The precise descriptions of these atrocities, which are almost as unbearable to read as they are unimaginable – the subconscious mind immediately suppresses such images – often forced Paula Doepfner herself to stop, which is why the works were more than a year in the making. Areas where the neural pathways converge and intersect to form nodes and bulges correspond to passages where the content was particularly hard to bear. On re-reading The Children of Auschwitz, which I myself have done for this occasion, it became clear to me from the present perspective just how often the book brings up questions about the intergenerational effects of trauma, one of the central themes of current research in the field of neuroscience. For instance, it‘s now possible to demonstrate that trauma can have consequences for later generations, one example being the human stress centre.

Paula Doepfner has been conducting her artistic research in the operating theatres of the Charité Hospital for eight years now. The question she’s concerned with here is an old one: how can the invisible be made visible? Standing behind the neurosurgeon, she looks directly into the exposed field of the brain, and thus also into the exposed field of neural pathways. At the same time, she’s looking at an enlargement on a monitor that shows everything in a clear and comprehensible way. She too says that the recurring structures remind her of barren terrain, of steppes, for example, or winter landscapes.

Looking at Paula Doepfner’s work with an art historically trained eye, there’s another level at which it becomes apparent how intensively she engages with her themes before she begins to visualise them. If we carefully follow the course of the lines in I got nothing, Ma, to live up to, some of them look like contours of human bodies. In fact these lines relate to The Massacre of the Innocents by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. So you could say that two human atrocities are superimposed here, inscribed in the work in the truest sense of the word. Besides Alwin Meyer there are texts by Anne Carson, excerpts from Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and also, for instance, from Paul Celan’s ‘Engführung’ (Stretto). One work featuring Celan can be seen here at art Karlsruhe. It’s no surprise that Paula Doepfner has spent so much time on Celan. Much of his life’s work was dedicated to the theme of language loss in the wake of traumatic experiences, and the question of whether such loss can be overcome through poetry. It’s apparent that this must be a crucial question for her too.

Celan’s late poetry, interspersed with teaching positions, fragmentary, abortive and muted, shot through with the specialist terminology of the natural scientist, is difficult for the modern reader to decipher. With Paula Doepfner, too, I think, there’s an extreme tension between scientific objectivity – one could almost say the inexorability of objective documentary evidence, as in her work with the Istanbul Protocol on the documentation of torture – and the attempt to capture by artistic means things that lie beyond the realm of human understanding.

When Paula Doepfner created her first text pieces, the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine had not yet started and the Hamas terror attack on Israel was scarcely imaginable, to say nothing of what came after 7 October 2023. But I think Paula Doepfner’s work raises our awareness of the potential for long-term damage to humanity. Text is central to her work. She has a unique way of combining a wide variety of genres – whether poems or stories or song lyrics – with classic fine art subjects and current social issues. And yet the process always remains visible. I’d like to say a few words about that too. It’s especially evident in her sculptural works. Death Letter Blues, for instance, is the title of a work created four years ago. It consists of a block of ice with a piece of paper frozen inside, inscribed with the words ‘I am myself. I am the enemy. Alone…’. The title relates to a song by blues legend Son House, while the text itself is from the poet Joyce Mansour. Paula Doepfner placed this block of ice on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, where it melted. The ice and the text fell apart, the bond between them dissolving entirely of its own accord. The first-person narrator of the poem seemed to resist this transformation, the process of melting to which the block of ice had been inexorably exposed, until the very words were torn apart. I think that’s an incredibly strong image. And it tells us a lot about her work. In this connection I’m reminded of a question Horace asked long ago: what carries more weight, the stone or the word? Durs Grünbein responded in favour of the stone when he was invited to the Kupferstich-Kabinett recently. With Paula Doepfner I think the word prevails.

Another series of sculptural works by the artist again deal with process, transformation and re-emergence, though almost entirely without words. These objects are made from sheets of armoured glass, shattered into countless fragments, but not broken, with coloured pigment applied to the panes. You’ll see some of them at the stand. The impact of these works can differ quite significantly depending where they’re set up. Paula Doepfner recycles the panes of glass, so to speak, gives them a new purpose. The effects she achieves with them are as unique as the cracks themselves, and ultimately not unlike the strings of text in her drawings. She says she hopes the works themselves possess a degree of universal validity. But once you start to engage with them, they won’t let you go. They may at first seem fragile, but their complexity reveals itself on closer inspection.

The melancholia that runs through her work, particularly the drawings, is evidence of a profound concern for the inscrutability of human existence. I was taken with it straight away, and now it won’t let me go. At the same time, its unintended relevance can be understood as an admonition. Let’s look closely, let’s watch what happens and let’s not turn away at the crucial moment. These are just some of the reasons I’m so delighted to award this year’s Hans Platschek Prize to you, Paula Doepfner. Congratulations!

Professor Marion Ackermann
February 2024