Artist Interview28.08.2006 The title of this exhibition is borrowed from the German writer WG Sebald’s 1995 novel, an elegiac and fragmentary meditation upon history, its lost customs and eccentric figures. Sebald's anonymous narrator wanders the melancholy landscape of East Anglia, discovering remnants of the past that prompt meticulously researched digressions interspersed with enigmatic photographs. Taking Sebald's tone and method as an inspiration, the exhibition is similarly allusive and associative. Thomas Helbig takes existing objects, such as kitsch figurines, and fashions them into grotesque forms, bringing disturbing new associations to the trace of the original object.