Consisting of 1078 Polaroid photos of abstract blue skies above Nazi concentration camps, the work is an unsettling way of looking directly at an unspeakable trauma that is also a fading collective memory.
Over a six--year period, Anton Kusters researched and photographed a blue sky at the last known location of every former Nazi Germany SS concentration camp and killing center across Europe. These camps existed for 4432 days, from 1933 to 1945, in a highly organized sys-tem of imprisonment, forced labor, and mur-der. More than half of these 1078 sites (concentration camps) have no visual remains today. Every photograph is manually blind-stamped with the number of victims beneath that sky, as well as its gps coordinates.
For The Blue Skies Project Belgian artist Anton Kusters (b. 1974) was nominated for the Prix Pictet 2019, and was a finalist for the 2020 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. The Blue Skies Project is curated by Monica Allende, and the exhibition installa-tion is accompanied by a 13 year long tracking audio/visual piece by sound artist and com-poser Ruben Samama.
Klinger, Jane E.: - Jane E. Klinger is Chief Conservator of Conservation Management at the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is also a Coremans Fellow of the Preservation Studies Program at the University of Delaware. She earned her Master's in Conservation at Rosary College Graduate School of Fine Arts at the Villa Schifanoia in Florence, Italy.
Kusters, Anton: - Anton Kusters was born in Belgium (1974), and obtained a master's degree in Political Science at K.U.Leuven (Belgium). He studied photography at STUK Leuven (Belgium) and Academy of Fine Arts, Hasselt (Belgium). He lives & works in Belgium and Tokyo. He explores the difficulties of representing trauma, loss of the experience of place, and the act of commemoration. Using an increasingly abstracted and deconstructed representation, he pushes for an ongoing influence of the medium on the work itself. His focus lies on investigating ways of seeing, the mechanisms of memory and remembrance, and the significance of viewer placement and subject-position. In 2019, he was nominated for the Prix Pictet, and he was a finalist for the 2020 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.
Ritchin, Fred: - Fred Ritchin is Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography (ICP) School. He was also the founding director of the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Program at the School of ICP and was appointed Dean in 2014. Prior to joining ICP, Ritchin was professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and co-director of the NYU/Magnum Foundation Photography and Human Rights educational program. He has worked as the picture editor of the New York Times Magazine (1978-82) and of Horizon magazine, executive editor of Camera Arts magazine (1982-83), Ritchin has written and lectured internationally about the challenges and possibilities implicit in the digital revolution.
Van Der Heijden, Teun: - Teun van der Heijden is a graphic designer and co-founder of Heijdens Karwei, a graphic design agency based partly in Amsterdam and partly in New York. They are known for the design of award winning photography books like Black Passport, Diamond Matters, Rape of a Nation, Latitude Zero, Interrogations, War Porn, Gold Coast, Inshallah, and recently REX. Teun has studied graphic design at St. Joost in Breda. A post academic studies in Art-Direction at the HKU in Utrecht and Photography at ACF in Amsterdam.
Walker, Joan M.: - Joan M. Walker is a conservation scientist at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She earned her Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry at Indiana University.
