In »Kunstlandschaft – Blind Spots, Black Holes«, Barbara Holub interweaves aspects of her family history with questions about the political, economic and ideological interests underlying urban transformation processes and visions of a “better society”.
The starting point is the personal history of Alois Holub, who was expropriated in 1945 and expelled from Czechoslovakia with his family. Barbara Holub connects her grandfather’s contradictory role as both a victim of expulsion and a beneficiary of the Nazi regime with a multilayered narrative about a site of significance to both her family history and the city of Ústí nad Labem. Her grandfather’s former printing works, which had to make way for the headquarters of the Communist Party in 1979, becomes the focal point for an exploration of different historical dynamics that continue to shape many places to this day.
Layer by layer, personal memories are interwoven with the findings of extensive research to form a narrative that offers no clear-cut conclusions. Places such as “Peace Square”, which remains a construction site to this day, become spaces for reflection, where the “blind spots” of a family history overlap with the “black holes” that abound in twentieth-century European history.