Artist Talk with Annette Kelm

In the framework of the exhibition: Radio Luxembourg: Echoes across borders

Language: English

Access: Free admission and open to all

For Radio Luxembourg: Echoes across borders. New Collection Display, Mudam invites you to a series of conversations exploring the voices behind the artworks – artists whose practices foreground sculpture, materiality and the narratives embedded within their chosen mediums.

Through these talks, artists will share insights into their processes, inspirations and the ways in which their work engages with cultural, social and political histories. From the transformations of found objects to the reinvention of artisanal techniques, and from the legacies of industrial materials to contemporary ecological concerns, these conversations offer a unique opportunity to delve into new and existing works of Mudam Collection.

With a particular focus on the artists’ perspectives, the New Collection Display. Artist Talk Series weaves connections between past and present, historical references and contemporary urgencies. The talks will highlight works which recently joined the collection thanks to the generosity of German collectors Gaby and Wilhelm Schürmann with the support of the members of the Cercle des collectionneurs du Mudam.

Biography 

The photographs in Die Bücher. by Annette Kelm depict the covers of books published between 1913 and 1945, whose authors were persecuted in National Socialist Germany, either for political views or Jewish origins. The series, which now includes over a hundred works, documents titles that were banned or burned during the ‘Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist’ (Action against the non-Germanic spirit) in May 1933. Together, they testify to the sweeping reach of the Nazi censorship. Celebrated appear alongside authors now largely forgotten. What united them was the regime’s condemnation of anything deemed liberal, progressive or modern – whether it was the ideological content or the formal experimentation of the cover design. Political essays, scientific publications, novels, poetry, children's stories and popular fiction were all subject to erasure.

With meticulous attention to colour and detail, Annette Kelm faithfully reproduces the original covers, preserving the wear and aging of each book as a visible trace of time. Like a historian, Kelm catalogues these works, transforming them into a quiet and insistent work of memory.