Munich 72, 2015

The texture of 580 postcards from Israel and Munich, all mailed between the sixties and eighties, build the base for two large-sized drawings made by Roland Stratmann. Both works on paper refer to each other. Some of the travel reports in the postcards speak of the occurrences of the Olympia-Assassination in Munich in 1972. Stratmann focuses on these text excerpts by superimposing symbols of our media-stamped memory. The large-scale ink drawings with their combination of text and image overlay the tapestry-like collection of postcards. This layering effect seeks to bridge the temporal and spatial distance of the massages in the postcards. Current events begin to resonate by viewing the past in this way. The “massages to home” in the postcards clearly communicate the collective prejudices and social climate of the times, and as we alternate between this textual sphere and the visual field of drawing, images of cultural distortion and misunderstanding become apparent.