Vera Hofmann – Souvenir

Vera Hofmann, born 1979 in Gießen, Germany, studied Photo Design at the Lette-Verein, Berlin. She graduated in 2009 and is now living as an artist and freelance photographer in Berlin. She also holds a BA in Business Administration and has worked in renowned advertising agencies like Scholz & Friends as an account manager before engaging with arts.
 
She works mainly with photography, but past projects also include videos, objects and installations. The main focus of her work lies on political, economical and social topics. In 2009 she executed a piece about the global economical crisis, and is about to finish works on Cuba and on monetary values. Her current project is a collaboration with German artist Sabine Schründer, called Benten Clay, which they started in September 2011 at Arteles-Creative Center in Finland, where they got invited for an artist-in-residence-program.
 
Her work has been awarded and displayed in various exhibitions in Germany, Istanbul, Finland and the UK and is represented in collections as House of Photography, Burghausen and Foundation F.C. Gundlach, Hamburg.
 
Vera Hofmann on Anti-Utopias
 
Visit artist’s website

 
Artist’s Presentation
 
Every fourth case of death in Germany is caused by cancer. At the moment there are four to five million cancer suffering people, every year between 330.000 and 380.000 new cases are registered. (source: Federal Ministry of Education and Research)
 
Everybody can get it as of today. The person who receives the diagnosis is mostly too shocked – and short of time – to look for an adequate therapy. The, in many cases, disputable, medical mainstream practice reaches from operation to chemotherapy and ultimately to palliative pain relief with morphine. By now the same doctors who “sell” those treatments to their patients refuse to use them for themselves. A chemo patient is very profitable for the hospital and the pharmaceutical industry (an eight week treatment costs 30.000 EUR (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sept 3rd 2004)).
 
A strong pharmaceutical lobby prevents alternative medicine to be established in mainstream practice. Even though there are astonishing, scientifically documented achievements. Those methods are a multiple cheaper and could discharge our health care system and lead to a healthier cure than chemotherapy.
 
My work Souvenir is a very personal way of dealing with the cancer diagnosis, a very intensive home care and the death of my 61 year old mother.
 
For me the constructions as well as the colorful photographic realization unfold a bitter power. They express the helplessness in such a situation, the illness that overruns me while I still think that this could never happen to me or someone close. The work is a valve for the rage against a health care system that leaves no space for alternatives. It expresses the feeling of having to deal with new and contrary dependencies within a family, with closeness, compassion and distance, degrees of assistance and the ultimate private sphere. It shows pain and fear on both sides and the search for ways of giving and receiving strength – moments that are burned into my memory.