A TREE IS BEST MEASURED WHEN IT IS DOWN 2015

Research for a museum project in Manchester has led Gallant to focus on the parallels in the construction of Britain and Germany’s national identities; forged through the culture of Romanticism, folk art and mythology. The drawings depict the historical appropriation of this strong iconography to carry through the Third Reich’s ideology: The portraits of fifteen key members of the ruling party disappear into fifteen Sylvanian landscapes. 

The paintings are by Carl Blechen, Gustav Carus, Johan Christian Dahl 

Casper David Friedrich, Joseph Anton Koch and Karl Schinkel. The titles come from Goethe’s novels and plays.

The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior officials of Nazi Germany, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference, called by director of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office; RSHA) SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the cooperation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the final solution to the Jewish question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to Poland and exterminated. 

Conference attendees included representatives from several government ministries, including state secretaries from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and representatives from the Schutzstaffel (SS). 

In the course of the meeting, Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up from west to east and sent to extermination camps in the General Government (the occupied part of Poland), where they would be killed.

Representing the Agencies of the State

The original digital collages are available as a limited edition box set, click here for more info...

photo credit: Ivan Jones