Karen Oostenbrink

Karen Oostenbrink first studied fine arts, art history and German literature in The Hague, Leiden (NL), and Berlin. Subsequently, she worked for several years as a visual artist and exhibition maker, ran a producer gallery in Berlin and founded an art space near the SPINNEREI in Leipzig with two other female painters. After moving to Freiburg im Breisgau she absolved her Master’s Degree in European Literature and Cultures at the University of Freiburg and in addition worked as a research assistant on several projects as well as at the Chair of Romance Literature.

Thesis topic: "About the family: In, with and about family albums"

In his remarks on photography, Roland Barthes tries to illustrate the relationship between the photographed object and its viewer with the metaphor of the umbilical cord. A metaphor that underlines the photography’s place at the center of family life. As photographic technology became accessible to everyone, the medium of photography became the primary instrument of family representation, and it has remained so to this day. Nevertheless, family photography seems to fulfill the promise of telling and perpetuating the family history and continuing its memory only to a limited extent, because its readability is essentially dependent on memory, on what Marianne Hirsch calls the "familial look". Thus, reading family albums and photographs is usually a shared and guided reading by most often an older family member who, like Vergil, leads through the family story, closes gaps in knowledge and provides anecdotes. But to what extent is a family album legible without memory and even an expression of a modern form of family telling? And what role do family photographs play in literature? My doctoral project builds on my final project at the Art Academy, in which I tried to reconstruct the history of an unknown family album, and combines literary studies with an artistic point of view to get to the bottom of the complex "About the family: In, with and about family albums".