In her project Consumed by Uncertainty, Antine Karla Yzer investigates her family’s past during and after the Second World War. The work begins with a box of 6×6 photographs, fragmented family stories and an adventurous escape narrative from Soviet captivity, as well as the memory of a close relative whose life was marked by alcohol addiction.

From these starting points, the project asks what is actually transmitted within families about historical events—and what remains unspoken. While public history seeks to document and interpret the past, family memories often emerge in fragmented and contradictory ways, shaped by silence, shame, repression and selective storytelling.

Using her own family history as a point of departure, Yzer explores how memories change over time and how narratives are reshaped across generations. In her research, she draws parallels between the staging of photographic images and the transmission of memory: both rely on fragments, omissions and subjective perspectives.

Rather than reconstructing a definitive narrative, the work focuses on the diffuse network of stories, images and absences that shape familial memory. In doing so, the project reflects on the distance between public historical knowledge and private family narratives surrounding Germany’s wartime past.

Antine Karla Yzer (*1993) works in artistic documentary and portrait photography and lives between Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin.