Tatiana Lecomte

Tatiana Lecomte, a Franco-Austrian artist and laureate of the EMoP-Arendt Award 2015, speaks of this same era by taking concentration camps as a recurring theme. Whether through the series Zement, Oradour, or B.B. (Bergen-Belsen), she is more interested in the difficulty of representing these places than in direct vision.

For this, she uses different techniques such as found images that she enlarges (Oradour) or photographs she takes herself but partially hides by placing a sheet over the photo during development (Zement). The subject is evoked by the title, but the vision is disrupted, and the places are no longer recognizable, or even identifiable.

In B.B., another concentration camp where the barracks had been burned, Tatiana Lecomte scratches the photographic layer as if, paradoxically, this iconoclastic act could bring out the memory of the place. By thus revealing orange spots that resemble fire, she references the history of the place through a kind of photographic off-screen. Contrary to what is generally thought of photography as a medium for recording reality, for Tatiana Lecomte, it is often more about absence than presence. It is by obstructing our view that she manages to show us what is hidden behind things.

B. B. :

We come across the interplay between fact and fiction once more with Tatiana Lecomte, a Viennese artist born in France. By scratching the documentary photography in the B. series, she uses a gestural artistic approach to evoke a fictional image of the site of the former nazi concentration camp on fire.

(Source : Claire and Paul di Felice)