Ronit Porat
Searching for New Archives
Imaginary museums, collections of illustrated broadsheets and the iconicity of artworks – How do idealized images of women originate?
Ronit Porat, Artist Meets Archives (2019), exhibition view
In her artistic work, the Israeli artist Ronit Porat, born in 1975 in the Kibbutz Kfar Giadi in northern Israel and living in Tel Aviv, deals with the subject of how archives let history originate. Ronit Porat began her most recent research during her stay in Stein am Rhein. She visited the archive of the Kartause Ittingen, which houses the estate of the painter Carl Roesch (1884–1979), including 210 so-called «Bilderbögen» (illustrated broadsheets). These are collages he made between the 1920s and 1950s using reproductions of images from the daily press, exhibition and auction catalogs, art magazines and brochures. Roesch made intensive use of the then new medium of photography and created a kind of individual art history that served him as a cultural pool. Similar to the picture atlas Mnemosyne (1925–1929) by Aby Warburg or the Imaginary Museum (1947) by André Malraux, Roesch was concerned with historical derivations, visual analogies spanning epochs and countries and comparative image analyses. In his lifelong search for the simple form, his illustrated broadsheets proved to be a good aid.
Carl Roesch, Bilderbogen 39, date of origin ca. 1923–1924
Carl Roesch, Bilderbogen 201, date of origin unknown
In her artistic work, Ronit Porat seeks to redefine these references and thus question our cultural visual memory by drawing attention to the limits of what has been passed down in images. In her work, she accesses archives of the invisible, explores unlived stories, places without memory, and the voids of history.
Ronit Porat, Lost Time (2014), Castrum Peregrini, Amsterdam
The collection of Carl Roesch’s illustrated broadsheets was processed from 2018 to 2019 and is now available as a database: Carl Roesch – Bilderbögen
Ronit Porat was Artist in Residence at the Chretzeturm of the Jakob and Emma Windler Foundation from August to October 2022.
Text: Helga Sandl (translated by Karl Hoffmann)
Images: Ronit Porat, Carl Roesch Database