Title: Nationalfeiertag
Photographer(s): Katja Stuke
Writer(s): Katja Stuke
Designer(s): Hans Gremmen
Publisher(s): Böhm Kobayashi,Dusseldorf,Germany and Fw:Books, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Year: 2015
Print run:
Language(s): English
Pages: 560
Size: 17×24cm
Binding: Softcover
Edition:
Print: Mart.Spruijt
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: China - HongKong, 2011-2014
ISBN: 978-94-90119-33-1
‘Nationalfeiertag’ is a book about one of the biggest, and most monitored squares in the world: Tiananmen Square in Beijing. 26 years ago the student protest took place in April and May and the massacre on June 4th. Officials and police try to control the images taken on the Square. Katja Stuke filmed a few hours of material on Tiananmen Square, and Chinese National Holiday on Oct. 1st as the following Golden Week. From this footage Stuke extracted hundreds of portraits. The book combines these portraits with newspaper clippings which are collected and spread by the June 4th Museum in Hong Kong to keep the memory of the protests of 1989 alive and to give the Chinese students their history back.
"My photography has always been about portraits, the faces of people in the streets. In this case, while filming on Tiananmen Square during Guóqìng jié, the Chinese National Holiday in 2011, I asked myself: What do they actually know? Do they think about it? Did they ever know or do they try to forget? Do they care about the historic significance of the Square? I didn’t have to ask these questions while filming and taking photographs in Hong Kong in June 2014. In some parts of China or even in some parts of Beijing, it still feels like 1965, or even 1921, unchanged since then. The synchronicity of different times or epochs shouldn’t be underestimated when trying to understand."
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