"Off frame"
Portrait photographs of long departed members of one’s family confront the viewer with the unknown and the passing of time. Due to the lack of testimony from the sitter’s side the viewer’s only possibility is imagining the off-frame space. In combination with the stories we have been told and the collective memory of a family, we hallucinate and reconstruct the person and the moment in which the picture was captured.
In this project the artist follows three narratives of deaths in his family and puts contemporary tableaus in contrast with personal super8 footage and photographic material. Printed on silk, it illustrates the fugaciousness and transparency of our perception and our memory.
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From the series "Off frame" © David Kilian Beck |
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From the series "Off frame" © David Kilian Beck |
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From the series "Off frame" © David Kilian Beck EXCERPT FROM DAVID KILIAN BECK'S DISSERTATION Remember me! Mourning Portraits in the Catholic Areas of Switzerland When I am laid in earth my wrongs create No trouble in thy breast Remember me! Remember me! But ah! Forget my fate. Nahum Tate, libretto for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas  At the very beginning of my research the biggest predicamentwas how to call the little portrait photographs of departed relatives, visible in most catholic households in Central Switzerland - the area I come from. Based on the fact, that there is no written Swiss German and therefore no standardised grammar, then nomenclature of the little mourning portraits are as varied as the Swiss German dialects and the outcome of my early research was rather slim. After a while I assembled different names and spellings with the help of a local historian and a printer. Finally, I compiled a varied list of how the pictures are called in other regions and dialects e.g. Leidhelgeli, Truurböldli, Totenzettel, Trauerandenken etc. All of a sudden, I came across various smaller publications of predominately local historians, who write about death, dying and mourning traditions. The custom of mourning portraits had its origins in the Netherlands in the second half of the 17th Century. The precursors just consisted of handwritten texts and religious imagery, to invoke to pray for the deaths. The first mourning portraits were annotated with a name and a date are in the collection of the Katharinenkonvent-Museum in Utrecht and date back to 1634 and 1640. In the following centuries, the custom spread from the Netherlands to the catholic parts of Germany down to the Northern parts of Italy. The practice arrived in Switzerland and Lichtenstein in the middle of the 19th Century, where the earliest artefacts date back to the 1850s. Over the years to the present day the Leidhelgeli have changed, less in their seize, but with a stronger focus on portraiture, away from the biblical texts and indulgence to an iconic representation of the deceased. When at the end of the 19thCentury photography became more accessible to the broader public, little cut out portraits were stuck on the memorial cards, often oval, framed by ornamental borders. Then developments in the letterpress-printing techniques allowed the portraits to be printed directly onto the paper and also the depictions of the departed became bigger, taking up one side of the Leidhelgeli to borderless portraits. [...] |
Full version can be read in the soon to be released catalogue.
David Kilian Beck's Biography
Swiss-born David Kilian Beck is a teacher, artist and photographer based in London.
After a foundation course in Fine Art at the Schule fuer Gestaltung Basel, he completed a teaching degree and pursued his artistic career as well as working as a teacher.
In recent years he has been involved in various art, theatre and photography projects in London and Switzerland, and has worked with the Swiss graphic design magazine «embryo». He has also exhibited at the Comic festival fumetto in Lucerne (Switzerland). Besides his visual work he has directed a handful of short films. His debut film «Motel» was awarded the Jugendfoerderpreis Sursee in 2005.
In his recent work, David focuses on death and the collective memory, using different practices for his tableaus. Further to that, he researches and writes about the photographic tradition practiced in the Catholic parts of Switzerland called ‘Leidhelgeli’, in which photography is used as an essential part in the mourning process and the remembrance of the departed.
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