History Matters / Konstellation Benjamin
Friederike Wappler/Arno Gisinger

The exhibition History Matters / Konstellation Benjamin examines the potentials of our modern-day culture of remembrance. Walter Benjamin’s concepts of ”constellation“ and ”now-time“ serve as a leitmotif and point of access— clear indicators of how the possible can shine forth in the appeal to the past and become the theme of constructs in the present. Arno Gisinger’s work Konstellation: Walter Benjamin in Exile plugs into this idea. Informed by a knowledge of Benjamin’s theory of art and media, the photographer reflects on how the philosopher’s history of exile can be invoked through the medium of photography and in the interaction of image and text. His work is shown in History Matters / Konstellation Benjamin in dialogue with works from the collection of modern and contemporary art. The book is a documentation of the exhibition of the same name at the Art Collections of the Ruhr University Bochum and amplifies the discussion generated by it with the addition of photographs by Arno Gisinger and texts by Florian Ebner, Bernd Stiegler, Nathalie Raoux, and Friederike Wappler. Arno Gisinger, photographer, lives and works in Paris and teaches at Université Paris Lumières / Paris 8. FriederikeWappler is director of the Art Collections of the  Ruhr University Bochum: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and curator of the exhibition History Matters / Konstellation Benjamin. Florian Ebner, art historian, is head of the Photography Department at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Bernd Stiegler is a professor in the Department of Literature, Art and Media Studies at the University of Konstanz. Nathalie Raoux is a philosopher, historian, and Walter Benjamin biographer at EHESS, Paris.