Soldaten_0008-0129

In Soldaten_0008-0129, Irina Ruppert combines passport and portrait photographs of international soldiers with dead insects. The portraits are relics from the past and reveal nothing about the individual stories of the soldiers. Their uniforms testify to their origins and military rank—but tell us nothing about what the young men experienced. Symbolically embodied by the dead insects, a sense of death surrounds the images. The flies and spiders remind us of passing and forgetting, of killing and being killed. Irina Ruppert’s work was initiated by her interest in her grandfather, who was from the Ukraine. He was drafted into the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War. The questions she would have addressed to her long-dead grandfather became the basis for Soldaten_0008-0129. (Sophia Greiff)