Souvenir aus Harburg

Jil Lahr's exhibition Things That Found No Space featured a personal collection of souvenir objects that symbolically represented vacation destinations and lent something permanent to the fleeting impressions of a journey. The found, donated, and purchased fridge magnets largely reproduced stereotypical representations of tourist sites and landmarks. The non-hierarchical arrangement drew attention to the particularities of the individual objects and opened up new readings in their combination. At the same time, the reduced replica of a souvenir store referred to the mass production of tourist memorabilia, which reduce the intention of materially recording an individual experience to absurdity. The exhibition addressed the journey of things from their purchase to the question of their whereabouts.
For the Jahresgaben, Jil Lahr made 30 glazed ceramic magnets. Whereas the exhibition featured collected souvenirs from all over the world, now the exhibition site itself becomes the motif. In contrast to the mass-produced objects of the souvenir industry, Jil Lahr's Jahresgaben are handmade, one-of-a-kind pieces. The intuitively chosen designs add up to a panorama of the Harburg train station. Despite its historical significance for the Hamburg area and its impressive Hanoverian-style architecture, Harburg Station is not considered a tourist attraction. Souvenirs are regarded as devalued artifacts of everyday culture, but in their application they generate meaning. Jil Lahr produces symbolic and cultural meanings through the Jahresgaben for the Harburg train station. In doing so, the representative idea of a souvenir is partly taken up as a direct reference to the place. The exterior view of the station building or the lettering Harburg give clear clues to the subject. Elsewhere, the artistic view is shifted to the off-beat. Crooked floor tiles with chewing gum residues or views of the tracks cannot be identified with a specific location. Other motifs evoke associative memories for regular visitors, such as the mustard yellow and brown tiles. Jil Lahr takes up the practice of fridge magnets and playfully rearranges them by combining classical forms and motifs with personal perspectives.