Known But Not Spoken
Description
Known But Not Spoken
As the last generation of Jewish Holocaust survivors are passing, so too is most of their history. Yet, it is not just a history of the Jews as a people that is passing but their individual family histories are as well. Many survivors of the Holocaust have chosen to say little or nothing to the their children about their troubled pasts. Either the experiences are too horrific to be recounted or they want their children to live a "new" life, free from the weight of these memories. Children of Holocaust survivors are frequently made to feel that the topic is forbidden in conversation and should not be raised often (if at all). The result of the silence of survivors is a generation of children that know historically what occurred but have little to no understanding of what their own parents endured.
My father was a survivor of the Holocaust. He, his father, his mother, and sister spent four years hiding in a single room in Holland for four years. My mother and her family left Austria just before the war and moved to Panama and hid in seclusion. They spoke of their experiences rarely and only when asked a direct question. Answers were always brief and factual; never going into depth about feelings or memories. I always told myself that when I was older I would seek more information. Unfortunately, my parents predeceased me: my mother in 1975, and my father in 1989. Now in my adulthood my work focuses on trying to recreate my past from what they left behind--primarily photographs and words which echo in my memory.
In this work, which is arranged at a Sabbath dinner table, I try to bring together images of memory, custom, and history. The images are presented within illuminated boxes that are placed at each place setting. The structure of the exhibit allows its audience to visually play with the transparent images of the boxes and invites each individual viewer to add multiple perspectives and associations to the exhibit. The position of the translucent boxes and images, their concordant lines of perspective, and the addition of the boxes or objects nested within the larger boxes permits different frameworks. As the participants discover merging images, their perspectives can move and shift with their eyes as they circle the table viewing the rings within rings of images before them.
The overall purpose of the exhibit forms within this circle (a major symbol of the Jewish tradition from the life cycle to the celebratory dance called the hora): the audience participates in the perpetuation of the symbols and in the communication essential to the tradition. The hope is that the viewers of the exhibit progressively join the memory of those in the photos and simultaneously contribute their own memories. The table that is filled with images but surrounded by empty chairs attempts to show a presence and an absence. A space is presented in which people can join in the memory of these holocaust victims and survivors while they also can realize how truly impossible it is to fully understand. In this way, through its structure and its elements as a whole, the Sabbath table, with its old customs and new representations becomes media itself. The spectators circle the table, their viewing patterns form a circular motion as one image feeds into the next, and the possibility to create associations with the memories of these individuals ultimately preserves and perpetuates the original photos in their eternal memory.
In "Known but Not Spoken," the traditional familiarity of the table and family photos and the estrangement of historical events and the holocaust is an arrangement that is continually in motion. I continue to participate in it myself, while inviting others, to wrestle with a personal and historical past as I do, in this place that falls somewhere between celebration and memorial.