Ellen Korth - Charkow

Self published 2016

CHARKOW is about the search for a sense of belonging with on its centre the artist’s mother and her secrets. 

Her mother fled during World War II from Ukraine through Germany to Holland. \nShe destroyed all personal belongings and concealed her origin. She searched and built her HOMELAND in her daughter. But for her daughter she remained a mystery. 

…Who was that woman with a suitcase full of photographs torn in half, who made that same suitcase vanish after I had found it as a little girl, on the top shelf of the hall cupboard? My mother didn’t throw pebbles but bread crumbs, in the knowledge that the birds would eat them. Bread crumbs are all I’ve got left.

CHARKOW consists of seven very complex and exceptionally designed, large format booklets. Each is dedicated to a person or a couple. Ellen Korth has visited men and women, who still have a feeling of home, in their apartment, in their garden, in items that they keep, or in their partner. In each issue, the pages are getting smaller and smaller to the inward, as a reader, you penetrate deeper and deeper into these private micro universes and in the middle of each booklet we encounter the people who belong to all the impressions that we could collect on the go. But the center piece is NADYA, dedicated to the mother, which contains nothing except a few undated photographs. In the middle everything is EMPTY.

7 booklets in a slipcase

260 x 345 x 30 mm

edition – 750

german/englisch/netherlands

photographs – ellen korth

interviews/text – ellen korth/sybren kuiper

Designed by SYB