Dachau 1974

Dachau 1974 was recorded on Korot’s visit to Dachau, Germany, the site of the former concentration camp, in the Fall of 1974. What she saw when she arrived was a sanitized former prisoner camp that was now a tourist site. Organizing the material she recorded at the camp for a four-channel work based on weaving structures, she created a non-verbal narrative work that moves the viewer from outside the camps walls, into barracks, passed crematoria to a quiet pastoral scene in its final images. This 24-minute work focuses on the architecture that remains from the past and the tourists moving through it. The artist has described this as a fragile work in that it relies on human memory and the structure of the work itself to endow it with meaning.

“…easily does justice to the claim of being a classic…Korot has deftly structured the installation in the manner of tapestry…She literally wove together threads of images into a carefully articulated pattern in which time and context are warp and woof…Dachau 1974 has a quality of visceral presentness in which memories are movingly embodied…”
— Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 1988

The installation work is a limited edition of three, and is in the collections of the Thoma Foundation, the Kramlich Collection, and shared between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC).

VDB is pleased to offer a single-channel composite of Dachau 1974 for educational use. For installation inquiries, please contact info@vdb.org for more information.