I HAD NEVER SEEN HER FACE SO RED, 2025
An installation of 35mm slide film photographs & inkjet transparency prints with accompanying performance
In this project, I work with the photographic archive of the late Hannah Abrahmson, a musicologist and professor of art history. When she passed away, she left behind a vast collection of over five thousand slide film photographs — now faded red with age — that she used throughout her career for teaching and research. The archive offers a sweeping survey of Western and religious art history.
My installation draws from over three thousand of these slides that depict women, overwhelmingly represented by male artists. I organized the images into dozens of categories: women with children, women alone in public, women being attacked by men, women attacking men, women dancing, women dancing with women, women naked with men, women naked with women, and many more.
Abrahmson’s archive also contains dozens of slides of personal photographs, including stereoscopic images of a group of women, with a figure cut out of the frame. If you look closely, you can tell it is a male figure who has been removed, leaving the group of women intact. These photographs are unlabeled, and the identities of the women, the absent man, and the person who made the cuts all remain a mystery.
I arranged the slides and cut-out pictures together to ask what our photographic archives — both personal and historical — reflect back to us.
The title of this work, “I had never seen her face so red,” is a line from Abrahmson’s memoir in which she describes her mother’s appearance as they fled their home during the Holocaust.
This exhibition was accompanied by a performative reading of Abrahmson’s memoir.
This project was part of the Chicago Cluster Project exhibition “Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them," March 28 - April 27, 2025
PERFORMANCE: “I had never seen her face so red”
A performative reading of Hannah Abrahmson’s memoir of fleeing Europe during World War II.
Hannah Abrahmson’s archive of slides also came with her extensive writings and personal histories. Her memoir of fleeing World War II is a profoundly harrowing account.
Her father, Arie Ben Eretz Abrahmson, was a musician deported to a concentration camp in occupied France. Miraculously, he escaped, and went on to risk his life on missions for the French Resistance, while his family waited in hiding for a visa to the United States. His music ultimately saved their lives: it was his career as a musician that secured their passage to safety. Hannah grew up to become a musicologist, publishing extensively about her father’s music.
Using a live webcam and light box, I layer Hannah’s father’s sheet music beneath her words. With each added page, the text becomes increasingly obscured. I use a knife to underline and cut out phrases and descriptions — accounts of mass deportations, bombings, violence, and state terror — that feel both historical and frighteningly contemporary.
With each cut, the words become blank voids of light. As the pages layer on top of each other, the text and personal history become illegible as they fade into darkness. Eventually her father’s handwritten sheet music is all that is left visible, and I conclude the performance by singing it.
Documentation by Eugene Tang
