In Soldiers_0008-0129 , Irina Ruppert combines passport and portrait photographs of international soldiers with dead insects. The portraits are relics from the past and reveal nothing about the soldiers' individual stories. Their uniforms reflect their origins and military rank - but we don't know what the young men experienced. Symbolically embodied by the dead insects, the images are surrounded by a premonition of death. The flies and spiders are a reminder of passing and forgetting, of killing and being killed. Irina Ruppert's work was initiated by her confrontation with her Ukrainian-born grandfather, who was drafted into the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. The questions she would have addressed to her long-dead grandfather became the basis for Soldiers_0008-0129.
