Passage Works: Ruth Beckermanns Art
By (Author) Patricia Allmer
By (author) John Sears
Manchester University Press
Manchester University Press
1st March 2025
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
791.43023092
Hardback
336
Width 138mm, Height 216mm
Passage Works is the first book-length English language critical analysis of the transdisciplinary work of the Austrian film-maker, writer, and artist Ruth Beckermann (b. 1952, Vienna). Beckermann's works interrogate identity and geography as formations of the intersections between the past and the contemporary. Taking as her central topics Austria and its history and politics, her own identity as a Jewish woman, and the contemporary global geopolitics of migration and displacement, Beckermann develops wider meditations in film, art, and writing on the persistence of European memory, and the meanings of Europe itself; on borders, migrations, and identities; on memories, traumas, and traditions; on the image as marker of presence and absence, repository of the traces of historical violence; and on the passage as metaphor for a range of physical, psychological, and ideological movements defining the complexities of contemporary cosmopolitan identities.
Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Edinburgh
John Sears is a freelance scholar