Excerpt from the catalogue ›Kalte Herzen‹, 2004


„The distance to the past seems almost unbridgeable in Johanna Diehl’s film and sound installations, which, in children memories, circle around the loss of the father and in doing so only ever more clearly define an vacancy. In voice-overs, the author herself speaks and tries, in small, unconnected episodes, to conjure up almost compulsive memories and summon what has been. And yet in spite of the plasticity of the details, she leaves out decisive elements and calls what has been just as little by its name as the motives, shot from three static perspectives in which the open spaces of the landscape hold the viewer in constant expectation of a protagonist, seem empty and lacking in expressivity. The images appear especially atmospheric through the medial filter of the nostalgic super-8 film material, which charges the randomly presented landscape with fervent memories."

Annette Urban, ‘Herzen unter Glas - über Momente des Obsessiven und Analytischen’, in: ‘Kalte Herzen - Klasse Rautert’, Timm Rautert (Hg.), Schaden.com Buchhandlung, Köln 2004