Passage Works

Passage Works explores the works of contemporary Austrian filmmaker, artist, and writer Ruth Beckermann (b. Vienna, 1952). Across her work in multiple media, Beckermann interrogates and critiques identity and geography as complex, shifting formations produced by multiple intersections between the past and the contemporary. Spanning over four decades, Beckermann's abiding thematic concern focuses on Austria's central role in an expanding Europe, its complex history and politics, her own identity and sense of 'unbelonging' as a post-war Jewish woman, and the contemporary global issues of migration and displacement. Her work extends these themes into wider meditations in film, art, and writing on the persistence of European memory and the meanings of Europe itself - on borders, migrations, and identities, and on memories, traumas, and traditions. She examines the image as a marker of presence and absence and a repository of historical violence, using the passage as metaphor for a range of physical, psychological, and ideological movements that define the complexities of contemporary cosmopolitan identities. Reading Beckermann's oeuvre within historical and theoretical contexts, this book elaborates on an expanded notion of passage that represents persistent transhistorical and transnational experience of movement between places, times, contexts, and conditions - above all, the post-memorial condition of being Austrian and Jewish in the aftermath of trauma.