Fleeting and documentary, peaceful and dramatic, playful and idyllic, abstract and baroque, razor-sharp and humorous: this is what the artist looks like at first, whose works are currently being shown in a special exhibition on the subject of suicide at the Museum for Sepulchral Culture in Kassel.

There is, for example, a decayed room in which something white and blurry is pressed against the wall below the window.

Or a caricature showing an older woman at the window from behind - her knitting in the foreground.

Or a futuristic capsule that seems to invite you on a journey through time.

Ina Lockhart

Editor on duty at FAZ.NET.

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In the second moment the white blur turns out to be a young woman in a white dress. Your face remains shadowy. It is a photograph from 1975 by the American Francesca Woodman, who repeatedly stages her person, her body in different rooms, thus making the subject of disappearing or merging. In the living room of the gray woman with a bun that Thomas Plaßmann drew, there is a loop of rope knitted from green wool next to the armchair - not a scarf or sweater. And finally, the space capsule “Sarco” turns out to be an aesthetic suicide variant for the plastic bag pulled over the head, with which people do not want to be found after their self-determined death. In countries like Switzerland, which are more liberal in dealing with the issue of euthanasia and assisted suicide,find their use. Philip Nitschke developed it together with the euthanasia organization "Exit" he founded.

Prejudices and facts

The exhibition “Suizid - Let's talk about it” does not overwhelm the visitor, but offers different points of contact in each of the six rooms over two floors.

To get involved in the emotions and thoughts of suicidal people, grieving relatives and a society that is confronted with this existential issue.

The works of art are only one perspective through which visitors can approach the often taboo subject of suicide. They are embedded in a second perspective, conveyed, for example, on partitions by the two floor-to-ceiling banners right at the beginning of the exhibition. In white letters on a black background, the visitor is greeted by a long list of prejudices: “Suicide is a free decision”, or “You must have done something bad if someone close to you kills yourself. Anyone who talks about suicidal thoughts is just crazy. Suicide asks the question of guilt. ”Students from the Institute for Social Affairs at the University of Kassel who later want to work as social workers and psychologists have collected such sentences in conversations with the bereaved of suicide victims. Together with the suicide specialist Roland Lindner,the curator Tatjana Ahle and the museum director Dirk Pörschmann started planning and developing the exhibition three years ago.

A few steps further hangs the second banner, on which the facts contrast the prejudices: “Those who raise suicidal thoughts do not induce anyone to commit suicide. About eighty percent of all suicides are announced somehow. Every nine minutes in Germany someone loses someone close to them by suicide. "