Exhibition / Hans – or – Don’t Bury Me In The Grave Of My Father Exhibition by Peter Pflügler

About the event

Hans – or – Don’t Bury Me In The Grave Of My Father is a search for justice.

It all begins with a found archive. Over a thousand negatives were left by Hans (1911–1997), the great-granduncle Peter Pflügler never truly knew, who died at the age of 86 after an attempt at taking his own life. Between the 1940s and the 1990s, Hans photographed himself with relentless dedication. As technology evolved, his face aged, and uniforms and settings changed, his gaze stayed the same – and so did a certain, inscrutable darkness.

In response to Hans’s archive, Peter begins taking new photographs. At the same time, he embarks on an almost investigative search: Who was this man? Why was he continually marginalized and then forgotten? The story is pieced together slowly. He discovers that Hans’s darkness was a consequence of violence inflicted by his father. The same traumatic past that, in adulthood, had isolated him from his family and society eventually led him to express a final, unfulfilled wish: not to be buried in his father’s grave.

Peter finds echoes of his own story in that of Hans. Patterns of transgenerational pain and silence emerge. His images seek and reveal those connections. They ask: How can we collaborate with someone we have never met? How can we photograph a ghost?

Peter’s new self-portraits and constructed scenes shape a different narrative. In this new context, Hans’s figure is celebrated in all its strength. His legacy is given back meaning and space, and an alternative ending begins to emerge. Although Peter’s project is still ongoing, its future conclusion has been declared: Peter will exhume Hans’s body, granting him the burial he desired.

Centered on a three-channel video installation, this exhibition embraces the theatricality of both Hans’s and Peter’s work – in the construction of individual images as much as in their understanding of photography as performance. Projected across three screens, photographs and videos appear and disappear, creating a constant exchange in which the two authors’ images continue to meet and form new relationships, just as their lives.

The exhibition welcomes the work-in-progress nature of the project, which began during the 2024/25 edition of Criticae, PhMuseum’s Online Masterclass On Documentary Photography led by Elisa Medde and Laura El-Tantawy. While the projection reveals an openness to multiple possible configurations, the backroom takes us behind the scenes: workspace and exhibition space converge. It is an invitation to think of photography not as a static collection of finished images, but as an ongoing action. Not only a documentation of life, but a force that moves, weaves, and transforms things.

Hans – or – Don’t Bury Me In The Grave Of My Father affirms the responsibility of the living: it says it is never too late to set things right, or to tell a fairer story. It is a story of discovery and reparation, of celebration and relief – a way to break silence and to give a space back.

Bio

Peter Pflügler is a visual storyteller from Austria, living in the Netherlands. He studied photography at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. His work is about the impossibility of secrets and the transformative power of silence. He believes that what is hidden and unspoken influences our lives. By using staged photography and text, he carefully tries to uncover and rewrite personal stories.

Admission to the exhibition is free. For more information, write to us at info@phmuseumlab.com.