Franz Wanner -Suspended Presences. Images of Exploitation

In the exhibition Suspended Presences. Images of Exploitation, Franz Wanner engages with a suppressed chapter of German history: National Socialist forced labour, its systematic entrenchment within the Nazi regime, and its social and economic repercussions, which continue to resonate to this day.

The starting point is an apparently inconspicuous object – an improvised pair of safety glasses made from plexiglass, found at the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp and photographed by Wanner in 2022. Presumably fashioned from leftover materials from the Nazi armaments industry, the glasses served to protect the body of an unknown forced labourer – an act of resistance, despite ist prohibition. This object becomes a metaphor for the will to survive and self-empowerment under violent conditions – and, at the same time, for the collective forgetting that followed 1945.

Franz Wanner’s artistic practice is grounded in making neglected sources visible. He combines documentary research with fictional elements to create complex visual narratives. Photographs, texts, videos and objects open multidimensional perspectives on the entanglements of history and the present. They reveal how deeply exploitative structure were embedded in industrial, political and social contexts, how they continue to reverberate today – and how Nazi forced labour was a society-wide phenomenon, from which large parts of the population benefited even as remembrance of it has often been repressed.

Suspended Presences. Images of Exploitation is the artist‘s first solo exhibition in Italy and was realised in collaboration with the Lenbachhaus Munich and the KINDL in Berlin.