01

no nation is as famous for its cult of worshipping its warriors as the japanese. broken up by the americans in 1852 after centuries of seclusion, the samurai and his ethics were banned from then on, only to be revived at the beginning of the 20th century and cause enormous damage, not only in asia, until the end of the second world war. akira kurosawa’s shakespeare adaptations dared to breathe new life into the exiled, desolate spirit, to achieve world fame again from the eighties onwards in the youthful heroines of studio ghibli founder hayao miyazaki as a silent seed. through the skillful transformation of warlike nationalistic history into narratives set in the fantasy/science fiction universe, the animé legend ghibli can now playfully continue to spin the samurai idea.

02

when a woman surrenders to the man rather than to the movement, history usually takes revenge with mild, if any, interest. hannah höch smoothly survived raoul hausmann’s dominance and, together with him, is considered the inventor of collage/photomontage. the ludicrous combination of previously seemingly incompatible pictorial worlds, taken from magazines, advertisements or other sources, created at the time of dada, enabled höch to achieve the role she deserved as an outstanding artist, despite her initial dalliance. her expressive worlds, also played out in painting using cubist methods also, are unerring introductions to the work of tanja hirschfeld.

03

every artistic epoch has its own stylistic elements of associative pictorial invention. while francisco de goya, who anticipated surrealism, succeeded with a miraculously basic trick in exaggerating his particular version of the human condition by placing animal heads on the bodies of his protagonists, hannah höch, a century later, no longer needed the surrounding scenario in order to concentrate fully on the psychologizing effect of her collaged constructions of human faces. with the same leap in temporal length, we immediately sink into the omnipotent swamp of the contemporary, global monotony.

04

coming from photography, tanja hirschfeld skillfully transforms the rather confusingly banal palette of the uttermost possible combination artistry into symbioses of ostensibly feminine aesthetics celebrating power. thoroughly familiar with the intermediate worlds of human depths, the artist does not leave her multinational, youthful heroines in the deceptive security of an overly narcissistic safe space for too long. in direct comparison with the tobias brothers, uwe and gert, whose romanian-folkloristic origins simultaneously fertilize and suffocate their works, hirschfeld pulls the veil from their faces precisely through the apparent interchangeability of their artistic dressing up. the more she masks, drapes or tattoos, the surface of mercantile, multi-seasonal sequences of rapidly elusive trivialities swaps to the representation of a tragic loss.

05

the approximations of a fairy and elf world as an innocent depiction of children consulted as a contrasting counter-position, hirschfeld’s artistic pendulum swings far and wide to reveal a longing that she is open to addressing, but which she slyly refuses to resolve directly. instead of untangling the enigma, she quickly assembles a few more twists and loops around the object of our desire. as she begins to roughly abstract certain areas of her work, the question of the underlying individual arises all the more. despite all the hectic exuberance, the studio ghibli heroine only wishes for one thing: to lie stretched out in a meadow and stare at the sky. this is how the child in us dreams of a better world.

martin eugen raabenstein, 2023

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