Aura Rosenberg at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert - New York

Art in America, Nov, 2002 by Christopher Phillips

To enter Aura Rosenberg's "Berlin Childhood" exhibition, you had to push aside plush mauve curtains, climb a ramp and pass beneath a video projection that showed children chasing butterflies through a summery field. The sound of an old-fashioned music box tinkled faintly throughout the gallery, underscoring the mood of reverie that surrounded the sculptures and large color photographs on view.

Berlin was the city in which Rosenberg's father was raised, and from which he fled Nazi persecution in 1939. She first came there in 1991 with her husband, artist John Miller, and their young daughter, Carmen, and they have subsequently returned for part of each year. Photographing her daughter growing up in Berlin, Rosenberg began to delve into critic Walter Benjamin's Berliner Kindheit (Berlin Childhood), a collection of 42 vignettes exploring his memories of bourgeois family life around 1900. Using Benjamin's section titles ("Butterfly Hunting," "The Carousel," "Hiding Places") as a starting point, Rosenberg began to compose short written commentaries to accompany her photographs, teasing out the unexpected interplay of past and present. (The photographs and texts have recently been published as a sumptuous book titled Berliner Kindheit.)

With photographs of brightly colored candies, teeming market halls and bedrooms illuminated by moonlight, Rosenberg conjures up children's ability to create, amid the surroundings of everyday life, private worlds of mystery and enchantment. She also finds surprising echoes of Benjamin's Berlin in a city that has undergone dramatic transformations in the past century. For example, Benjamin dwells at length on the Kaiser Panorama, a spectacular device that enabled viewers to gaze through stereoscopic eyepieces at changing images of the wonders of the world. Rosenberg shows us a Berlin museum where a group of young girls sit, enthralled, around just the same kind of contraption. For good measure, she also shows us contemporary teenagers immersed in a virtual-reality game.

Rosenberg comes from a family that was once part of the same Berlin milieu as Benjamin's. Perhaps for that reason she seems to regard him as a benign, kindred spirit--a guide who enables her to connect the vanished world of her father with the living world of her daughter.