Drawing on the Past to Build a Better Future. Beate Passow (b.
Stadtoldendorf, Germany, 1945; lives and works in Munich) creates
installations, photodocumentaries, and collages that seek to salvage her
subjects from oblivion, though as she sees it, her art is an effort to
come to terms not so much with the past as with the present. When her
compositional inventions touch on painful memories, their objective is
not to arrive at new insights. Rather, she aims to uncover visible and
verifiable states of affairs and throw them into sharp relief. In her
cycle of pictures Monkey Business, the artist unfolds a mysterious
fairy-tale world with a political edge. Strange animals and mythical
figures populate the large-format black-and-white tableaux, which a
closer look reveals to be woven tapestries. The unusual protagonists
roam readily identifiable locations: Gibraltar, New York's Wall Street,
Brussels, or the island of Lampedusa. Behind these ostensibly simple
facts of geography loom the darker aspects of contemporary European
politics: Passow's work calls for a debate on the systems, economic
structures, and political movements that rule the continent.
