Kinder der Ruhr (Children of the Ruhr)

The art is to let other people feel what we feel, to liberate them from themselves and to propose our personality to them for this particular liberation. − Fernando Pessoa

‘Peruvian girl with black hair’, ‘Asian boy’ or ‘Blond boy with round face’ - the internationally active Belgian artist Marie-Jo Lafontaine usually gives her pictures of children sober descriptive titles; only a few have more a poetic description like ‘An anemone between thorns’. She has been working on the photographic cycle Children of the Ruhr since 1996. Conceived as a work in progress, she exhibits it in changing constellations. In the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Marie-Jo Lafontaine will show the cycle in an arrangement that has been supplemented by five works for a few weeks.

Nineteen Children of the Ruhr are presented here in large-format photographs. They are, without exception, individual portraits, over a coloured predella and over two metres high. From their elevated position, the children look directly at their counterparts and are at the mercy of their observation. The beauty of the depiction seduces the viewer at first, but the monumentality and grandeur of the images also have a disturbing effect. This disturbance containing the confrontation with the serious, intense gaze of the portrayed is a challenge for the viewer. The children demand his attention; insist that he takes an attitude. Despite their nakedness, it is not the children who are defenceless – it is we, the viewers, who are.

‘The Children of the Ruhr’ are boys and girls of different ethnic groups and different ages, as they live in many places in the Ruhr area. Economically dependent on life in an industrial conurbation, they are forced to live in close quarters with each other, next to each other and often even against each other; asserting individuality is difficult. The discomfort with these images results, for example, from a sense of responsibility: children are in this world because we created them.

Over and above the social situation of children, the cycle refers in general to the modern ‘conditio humana’, albeit without judging it. Rather, Marie-Jo Lafontaine succeeds in making art tangible as a projection - as a projection of one’s own state of mind onto the work, in which every moment of contemplation is also open to a scrutinising observation of the self. Solely in the sense of this openness, the children's pictures are moral.