AFTERIMAGE
Sound Installation (2025)
Embossed print on handmade rag paper, dubplate vinyl record, turntable, speakers, fans, microphones, guitar amplifiers
Installation
odp Galerie / Leipzig
2025
Can you recall a memory from a decade and a half ago that still feels as vivid as if it happened yesterday? What remains of the memory of places where freedom once seemed close—places that are now likely reduced to rubble?
In her exhibition, artist Anna Schimkat explores the fragility of memory. She presents nine sound recordings and nine accompanying graphics that give us access to her recollections of nine places in Damascus, a city she visited in 2010 for an exchange project with students of the Art University Damascus and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden—shortly before the Arab Spring and the ensuing civil war reshaped its future.
Among the students she met was a guitarist who played hard rock and heavy metal—music that was not welcome under Assad’s dictatorship.
When freedom disappeared from the city’s daily life and the return trip was cancelled, the last traces of Damascus’s openness resurfaced unexpectedly—in Leipzig, in 2017. During the project VISIT LINDENOW, Schimkat encountered artists and musicians who had been forced to leave their homeland simply to continue creating and playing their music.
The exhibition examines memory as a kind of afterimage—the lingering imprint that hovers before our eyes after exposure to intense light. In asking what remains of memory, it offers a possible answer through a live music performance at the opening. Schimkat invited artist Isam Almari, who she met in 2017 to perform a short yet powerful sequence. This performance can be understood as an afterimage of the memory of emerging freedom that once pulsed at the beginning of Damascus’s democratic movement.
And after Assad—what will remain then?
In the exhibition, you can follow the sounds of Damascus 2010 on a vinyl record. Each recording corresponds to one of the graphics, and you may listen to them in sequence.
