Anatomy, 2006

During her scholarship as a DAAD artist-in-residence in 2005/2006 Ana Torfs researched in the Freiburg Military Archive on a trial held in May 1919, the ‘Case of the Murder of Dr. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg before the Military Field Tribunal of the Cavalry Guard Rifle Division in the Main Courtroom at the Berlin Criminal Court’. Ana Torfs pinpointed selected statements from this trial to compose ‘A Tragedy in Two Acts,’ the literary script for her installation. She gave the project the ambiguous title ANATOMY. The absurd show trial of Luxemburg and Liebknecht’s murderers includes a considerable amount of harrowing detail on how the murders were actually committed. The case files have been divided up by Torfs into short scenes so that a tragic story emerges in which details from the same event are told from different angles, highlighting the relative nature of the narrative. The focus is on language, and of course language is never objective… The book, which is a fascinating ‘translation’ of the installation, contains text and photography by Torfs including the ‘Tragedy in Two Acts’ and besides a personal text about the creation process of the installation.