I had never seen her face so red

An installation of 35mm slide film photographs & inkjet transparency prints with accompanying performance

This project was part of the Chicago Cluster Project exhibition “Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them," March 28 - April 27, 2025

Hannah Abrahmson was an Israeli-American musicologist and professor of art history. Born in Bratislava, Abrahmson’s family fled Czechoslovakia for the United States during the Holocaust. When Abrahmson passed away, she left behind a massive archive of thousands of slide film photographs, faded red with age, which she had used for teaching and research throughout her career. Her art history archive offers a sweeping survey of Western art. The vast majority of these slides contain images of women – mostly portrayed by male artists – all of which are presented here.

Abrahmson’s archive also contains dozens of slides of personal photographs, including the stereoscopic images presented here. Someone had altered these slides, cutting out a man from each frame, leaving the group of women intact. These photographs are unlabeled. The identities of the women, the absent man, and the person who made the cuts all remain a mystery.

I arranged these two archives 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.

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.

In this performance, I weave Hannah’s father’s sheet music beneath her words. With each added page, the text becomes increasingly obscured. With a knife, I underline and cut out words and phrases — accounts of mass deportations, bombings, violence, and state terror — descriptions 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 sing it.

Documentation by Eugene Tang