Talya Feldman

Ripple Effects

Exhibition Text by Talya Feldman

(As published by Kunstverein GASTGARTEN, e.V.)

2024

It is difficult to articulate the scars that mass shootings leave behind.

Following the racist and antisemitic attack in Halle (Saale) on October 9, 2019 that killed Jana L. and Kevin S. and injured many others, I delved deeply into the police records, witness testimonies, and the various details of the case as a means of understanding its relationship to so many other acts of white supremacist violence that we had been seeing in recent years. I marked the continuities of violence and relationships between cities like Christchurch, Poway, El Paso, Hanau, and Buffalo with Halle. As a survivor, I sought information for what had happened in Halle, as a means of making sense of such cruelty, and to gain control of what I could in the moment. As an artist, I sought to visualize this data as a means of reaching beyond my own experience and connecting to others through education and imagery that could form a narrative from the perspective of survivors and victims, in stark contrast to national media coverage whose focus, unfortunately and consistently, lies solely on the perpetrators.

How do we analyze statistics and data surrounding violence without, as our society is so apt to do, contributing to or glorifying that violence? İbrahim Arslan, a survivor of the racist arson attack in Mölln from 1992 that killed his cousin, sister, and grandmother, Ayşe Yılmaz, Yeliz und Bahide Arslan – often refers to a first and second attack when describing the reactions of the media, society, and law enforcement to acts of violence. The first attack is the act itself, with the perpetrators responsible, but the second comes in the months and years after. Survivors and the families of victims of terror are often mistreated, abandoned, and at times criminalized – victimized by the media, blamed by the police, abused in court, left alone to deal with the consequences on their own, and forgotten.

But the second attack also comes in the form of data. Data that lists human beings as numbers and statistics, as damage.

Damage-driven data is what indigenous researcher and professor Eve Tuck refers to as a cautionary tool for researching the history of violence on any one community. When we look only at the effects of oppression she writes, we risk long-term repercussions of thinking of ourselves (i.e. those most affected by violence) as broken. Over-researched and yet, ironically, made invisible. Instead, Tuck proffers, we must hold researchers accountable, and focus our work on desire-driven data that offers an alternative narrative. Arslan often states that we as victims are not weak, passive, or incapable of enacting change. ‘We are the main witnesses to what happened.’ Tuck would describe such a statement as desire-driven. In a society so rooted in blaming the victim (one need only look at the gross number of sexual assault cases where the victims, often women, are blamed by law enforcement, courts, and media for what happened to them because of their tone with the perpetrators, their clothing, where they were walking – to understand this statement) or infantilizing them. What Arslan describes is a desire to be seen beyond this label of ‘victim.’ Communities and individuals affected by violence are the narrators of their own stories, they are more than what happened or happens to them, and they are capable of defining themselves beyond the damage which outsiders are so apt to tie and box them to.

In considering this – this alternative narrative, this re-visioning research as Tuck describes – I have, over the last several years, sought to display visually and sonically new methods for looking, listening, and educating the public on histories of violence within our local and global communities that elevates the voices and perspective of those most affected. 

In 2021 I was awarded the DAGESH Art Prize for my 18-channel sound installation ‘The Violence We Have Witnessed Carries a Weight on Our Hearts’ displayed temporarily at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. This work looked at a history of racist and antisemitic violence, as well as police brutality in Germany over the last 40 years through the phone voice messages of solidarity that families of victims, survivors and initiatives had sent to one another during the pandemic. These messages, hundreds, were sent from cities across Germany on days of commemoration and court dates, as a means of showing support for one another despite being kept apart by the coronavirus. While we cannot be with you in person, many would start, please know that we stand with you from where we are. I was engaging with a history of violence through the voices of those who have consistently and unceasingly been fighting back. As scholar Sara Ahmed writes, when it comes to solidarity, it does not mean that we share common experiences or even dreams, but it does mean that we seek to find a common ground. This common ground is one that I see as being another imperative tool for re-visioning research and the continuities of violence we so desperately need to record, but not at the expense of those most affected by it. 

In this same vein, I began a series of paintings in 2022 on aluminum that pulled from the data tables of the Gun Violence Archive in the United States. In a 2022 poem published in ‘Obit’ by poet Victoria Chang, she describes grief as a rectangle cut from perfectly blue sky. In visualizing the growing numbers of victims and survivors of mass shootings in the US through the archive, I began cutting the printed data tables from painted shades of blue. The series is an attempt to see the people behind the numbers, and to build a space to grieve in a society so desensitized to gun violence. 

In 2023 National Public Radio’s Embedded hosted a three-part podcast series narrated by a handful of girls, mothers, and coaches of a small cheer gym in Buffalo, New York. The podcast was released a year after the racist mass shooting that killed 10 people at Buffalo’s Tops supermarket on May 14, 2022. Its leading narrator, Na'kya McCann, describes her friends and family, her old cheer coaches in Buffalo from who they were before the attack – and who they were after. “This is the story of how one person's action has a ripple effect on a small city,” she says, "When this incident happened, it was in the news for a month or two, but we're still living it.” 

McCann’s words reminded me of the many stories I had been documenting as part of an ongoing digital artwork titled WIR SIND HIER (WE ARE HERE), which I had begun in 2022 with the support of families of victims of racism, antisemitism, and police violence. The project claims spaces of remembrance in public space from the demands and voices of the families. It invites users to imagine how remembrance, from city streets to monuments, could and should look like today as an active form of resistance and change. By scrolling over the names of victims, users of the platform view maps of their cities and the spaces claimed or being claimed by families and initiatives today, and are given an overview of right-wing extremist attacks and police brutality in Germany and the former GDR within the last 40 years, including cases of violence that have not yet been properly investigated or recognized as hate crimes by state and local authorities. 

In developing each part, I and my project colleagues, Rachel Spicker and those at Studio Marshmallow in Hamburg, take a great deal of time visiting with the families, walking with them through their cities, documenting the sites that are most important for their own remembrance – and not what may be so typically defined for them by politicians or society. As one family described to me – they are grateful to be able to, for once, talk about the life of the grandson they had lost, rather than his death. 

So often media coverage is focused on one day, one event, the perpetrator or perpetrators and if that, for only a short period of time – when in fact, as McCann articulates, even in months and years afterwards: We are still living it.

WIR SIND HIER claims the spaces where victims of violence lived. Their favorite parks, football fields, schools, playgrounds, and restaurants. And it touches on the hundreds of people their lives affected, as well as their loss. The football coaches, teachers, colleagues, bosses, and friends that were a part of them, in addition to their close family members. Their cities.

“We are changed forever,” survivor Ismet Tekin, from the 2019 Halle (Saale) attack stated shortly after the incident. “Our bodies are intact, but not our souls.”

It is difficult to articulate the far-reaching consequences of this change. The scars mass shootings leave behind.

The definition of a ripple is the moment that an object drops into water, forming a series of waves along the water’s surface. The definition of a ripple effect is when these waves are translated into events that occur, consequentially, after one singular incident – reverberating outwards. Some ripples form into acts of solidarity and resistance, while others into second attacks. As damage-driven.

In November 2023 I continued a new print series of city maps that were featured by the Kunstverein Gastgarten in Hamburg titled “And Our Cities Change.” The building sites, where the first object dropped and the attacks happened – the mosques, synagogues, supermarkets, movie theaters, night clubs, and schools are outlined and left empty. Each map, when displayed next to one another, visualizes one long horizon line. Each incident, from Christchurch to El Paso to Halle to Buffalo, is then connected to one another. Each crime scene becomes a point from which the effects of hatred ripple outwards across the world, from one city to the next.

In his book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk details the effects of violence on our bodies and minds, individually and collectively, and like Tuck, urges a re-visioning that focuses on an imagination beyond the trauma that has interrupted our lives. “Without imagination there is no future,” he writes, “No ability to imagine a better future.” I have, in all these works, been seeking to articulate and imagine an alternative reality, beyond trauma, through the desire-driven and substituted sounds, voices, and images that work to redefine violence and its victims. That re-imagine our cities and futures from the resistance and resilient efforts of those most affected. “Our capacity to destroy is matched by our capacity to heal one another,” van der Kolk states. So too is our capacity to create – and to change.