Anna Roura „Lost Babies“ or: What do Göring, King Abdullah II. and Pablo Escobar in have common?
– An inner dialogue turned written podcast with at least one imaginary host about the vernissage at Galerie Bauchhund in March 2026 by Peter Wagner and Petroschek Wulgarow
HEY YOU! YOU DON’T WANT TO READ EXPERIMENTAL REVIEWS? SKIP TO THE SHORT STANDARD REVIEW AT THE END OF THE PAGE!
So let’s go, let’s do this. It’s been months since we went to the vernissage at Galerie Bauchhund in Berlin Neukölln of this very sweet lady.
Oh I agree, she was very sweet.
Yes. Very, very sweet. And I guess that’s what Göring, Abdullah II. and Pablo Escobar have in common.
That they are sweet?
No doofus. They are all part of Anna Roura’s exhibition “lost babies” – plus, babies are sweet, too. So now we resolved the question in the headline and can move on to doing drugs or whatever art critics do.
Not so fast, my man. Before we go back to whatever art critics do after they are done having rich parents, going to cocktail parties and being college drop-outs, holding PHDs anyways and/or writing curatorial texts with AI, we could flex a little bit about this exhibition and visual culture. Tell me: how was your experience of the exhibition?
THE EXHIBITION EXPERIENCE
So yeah, it was really good, bro. I went there with a friend and they had their kid with them and the kid is like 11 and very smart, so we checked out every single picture on the wall and everything that was written down and we had a great time. The boy constantly asked me stuff, like: What does subhuman mean? Or: why is Hermann Göring your favorite Nazi? And stuff like that.
But tell me –
HOW WAS THE EXHIBITION SET UP?
You sure can ask questions, man. Alright, let me tell ya: you come into the gallery and to the left there is this wall, man, I swear to you and there are like really cute baby photos. They are all black and white, I guess, I mean that’s how I remember it. And to the right, like directly on the right wall, there are quotes made with white type letters on black backdrops and they are all framed, and these quotes man, I would say someone really likes fascists, you know? And I am like – just to myself, which is you – omg did I go into a fascist gallery opening, man? Because there is like some Nixon stuff and Stalin stuff and Netanyahu stuff and I just recently got cancelled by a friend for being supposedly antisemitic because I was expressing concern about the genocide in you-know-where, so I was really scared man, but then…
Then what?
Then I realized that this exhibition had
SOMETHING ARTISTS CALL CONCEPT
Hit me.
Alright, so you know: Left wall — baby pictures of dictators and fascists and so on, but super cute, I promise you. You could even recognize Baby Hitler, cute but already looked kind of grim. And right wall: Quotes. And you know what – they were exactly mirroring each other!
Damn.
Yes, so I figured the concept was basically that all the space in between, about 5 meters, was like the time that passed between baby picture and quote and as a visitor you are literally wandering between both walls and wondering (see what I did there?) what happened to those beautiful, beautiful (but sometimes grim looking) babies and what the cause of such racist, fascist, misanthropic, antisemitic, antimuslim, belief could be.
And the juxtaposition made it, like, very physical. Because you know, it actually comes from an ongoing book project which Anna Roura, the artist, is doing. But you know what? It just worked a lot better for me put onto the walls. At the entrance, they gave you some kind of an index with rows and names, like a map, and you could walk from wall to wall or down each row and you were figuratively walking all over the planet. This exhibition really took you places. It was quite entertaining and well done.
So, you have no criticism about it, whatsoever?
Well…..
Well, spit it out.
There was one mistake made with the perfect mirror-matching between quote and picture, so I ended up thinking for a while: WHAT? MY BELOVED JOSEPH GOEBBELS SAID THAT? But thank god, I could inform her and I think they fixed it later… Soooo, you saw it too – do you want to…….
FLEX A LITTLE BIT ON VISUAL CULTURE
Alright, I will. I mean, what is this? A written podcast or what? Are podcasts still a thing? I don’t know, but what I can really say from experience is that in Marketing and Social Media, Quote-Posts were actually a thing for a long time and still kind of are.
Can you describe a Quote-Post to our audience?
Sure. So, a Quote-Post is the face of a famous person or from someone from your company or a public figure, literally any one you can get a famous or powerful quote from and – most importantly – a royalty free picture. And then you smash all of that together into your corporate design and then you have a quote such as “history is written today” over the tomato-smushed face of Winston Churchill or “digital marketing is our passion” over the face of Marketing Markus from Middle Management.
And what has this to do with Anna Roura’s “Lost babies”?
Yeah, the trick is somehow that Anna, can I call her Anna or should I call her Roura like a professional art writer?
I think Anna is fine.
So, the trick, or better….. let me start again: So, from a perspective of visual culture in the digital age, we have these highly condensed media products like quote posts to attract attention. Highly condensed, because they combine text, picture, through alt-texts they contain meta text, through the platforms we have the possibility of hypertexting (like mentions, hashtags, etc.) and, of course, through AI, they can be completely dissolved into code. If you then look into the histo-cultural dimensions, they project the past and supposed authority of the old into the present, but basically just to attract attention for a third party (the posting party). Through their shape and composition and their semantics and interpretation (e.g., the example with Churchill – dude from the past with authority says something and we repeat that in a quote post to get attention for ourselves), the format becomes authoritarian in itself. Just the use of a quote post perpetuates the idea that the dead still hold influence over the living – and there is also a magical component, because by quoting them and posting their faces, we are summoning their authority, their power, like in a spell to work in our favor. Concluding: The process of their making, as well as their purpose and their context, are kind of problematic or could be at least seen as that. The format itself becomes authoritarian and denies or dilutes cognitive access to questions: Is this person even real, is the quote real, what is the source, what was the context? Instead we get: Just take it, it is a quote-post, it must be real, now you know who said what and have something to talk about with your friends if your attention-ridden brain even remembers.
Now, back to Anna. By taking this quote-post and deconstructing it and at the same time transferring it from the digital realm (pictures and quotes were most likely found digitally, right?) into the analog space, she dissolves the authority of the quote-format, and the authoritarianism of the digital. Visitors have to walk, they have to read, they have to walk back, they have to verify, they have to exchange information, they have to use their brains to make sense of what is in front of them. In this way, not only the obvious questions “what happened to those people? Where does fascism come from…..” etc. pp. are transported into the exhibition, but audiences are tricked physically into conducting one of the important pillars of a truly democratic society: they are forced to make an effort in educating themselves – not through google alone, but through real life experiences and signs, notes, indices, text, pictures in the physical realm.
THE END?
Wow that was truly an exhibition review in the end, even with a major new interpretation, I’m proud of you, bud. I mean, you could have used phrases like “most profound” or “bringing together two opposites in one thingie” or “innovatively fresh” or “cross-medial-interactive-performative-installation” but I am still proud of you.
Thanks, bud.
Really like that Anna and her concept art, man.
Then you should have gone to that group exhibition at Culterim space at Ostbahnhof last week, she had a fresh new video installation there that was kind of fun and touching on languages in multicultural relationships and relationship languages.
Damn, I missed it man, damn I missed it.
THE END.
A Short Standard Review of “Lost Babies” by Anna Roura
Galerie Bauchhund, Berlin-Neukölln, March 2026
Anna Roura’s “Lost Babies” works with a deceptively simple spatial arrangement. On the left wall hang black-and-white baby photos — all of them future dictators, fascists, and tyrants, from Göring to Stalin to Netanyahu. Facing them, on the right, are framed quotes by these same figures in white type on black. The two walls mirror each other exactly, and the roughly five-meter gap between them becomes a walkable span of time separating an innocent (if sometimes already grim-looking) beginning from a dehumanizing word. An index handed out at the entrance serves as a map, letting visitors move between the walls and down the rows — a walk that figuratively circles the planet.
The work unfolds through this physical movement. Rather than offering ready-made interpretations, the juxtaposition makes you walk back and forth, read, compare, and ask yourself where racism, fascism, and misanthropy come from. Originally drawn from an ongoing book project of Roura’s, the material gains real immediacy on the walls.
What makes the show worth dwelling on is what can be derived from it about digital visual culture, since the arrangement reads almost like a deconstructed “quote post” — that familiar marketing unit of a famous face paired with a punchy line and folded into corporate design, built to attract attention for whoever is posting. Seen this way, the format carries a faintly authoritarian logic: it summons the authority of the past to serve present ends, while discouraging the obvious questions — Is the quote real? What is the source, the context? — in favor of simple acceptance.
None of this is something Roura states outright, but it is precisely what her arrangement lets the viewer arrive at. By lifting the quote post out of the digital realm and into analog space, and taking it physically apart, she dissolves both the authority of the format and the authoritarianism of the digital. Visitors have to walk, read, return, and verify to make sense of what is in front of them — and in doing so are drawn, quite physically, into one of the pillars of a democratic society: the effort of educating oneself, not through Google alone, but through signs, texts, and images encountered in the physical world. A conceptually smart, surprisingly accessible exhibition that draws remarkable weight from a simple mirroring.