Marienbad by the sea

Nina Röder's ancestors were expelled as Sudeten Germans from the Czech town of Marienbad after the Second World War. Until then, her great-grandfather Josef Behr worked as a concierge at the Hotel Bayrischer Hof. Since 2018, Röder has been travelling to this spa town with her family and spending time there in precisely that hotel.

Stylised as a place of longing, Marienbad with its neo-kitsch aesthetics initially becomes the backdrop of a game with identity construction for Röder. Due to the staged and harmlessness of the place, images of the mother repeatedly appear alongside erotically connoted glimpses, showing fictitious or constructed characteristics.

With this series, Röder ties in with the works on her family narratives and traces questions about the desire for knowledge of origin.