Ash Portrait After Cremation Ensures Mom Will Be Remembered

An excerpt of the chapter “How Much Death Can Life Bear” by Josef Wetz, from Icons in Ash, a collaborative conceptual artist’s book, culminated by founder Heide Hatry.

In concrete terms icons and ash shows the visitor both the graceful design of the body as well as fragility. In so doing, it becomes clear that the body’s vulnerable fertility is actually the vulnerable price of its complexity. Without its perishability and its finitude, mortal life would be impossible. For this reason, icons and ash demonstrates at the same time the “greatness and misery” of human existence…

Icons and ash calls attention to the uniqueness and specificity of the human being by bringing out the exquisitely structured bodies against the background of our mortal transients. By such means it teaches the viewer astonishment in their own existence for which wonder these remains little room in everyday life.

The exhibition teaches one to look anew upon one’s own life as something exceptional. It celebrates life as a present, a gift and, by association, a task. Most of the time, in the hustle and bustle of our quotidian modernity, the distinctiveness of life is injuriously overlooked. By contrast, in icons and ash, quickly gathered reflections start to spread. What is more inconspicuous and self-evident – existence itself – becomes what is most remarkable and strange.

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