Images of displaced memories: documentation, intervention, and the ethics and aesthetics of seeing

Abstract

This article considers the works of Polish artist Łukasz Baksik and Israeli artist Simcha Shirman, both of whom used photographic practices to address memory and displacement through depicting graves and gravestones. Baksik's most prominent project, titled Macewy Codziennego Użytku [Matzevot for Everyday Use] (matzevot is Hebrew for ‘gravestones’) documents and brings home a socially and politically fraught phenomenon by which Jewish gravestones are plundered or misappropriated from cemeteries in Poland, and transformed into everyday uses such as building materials or working tools. From Shirman's wide-ranging oeuvre, I discuss a series of photographs depicting graves and gravestones, taken at Muslim cemeteries in Acre – a city where his parents, both Holocaust survivors, settled after World War II. It is argued that despite lacking visual or formal resemblances, both projects − through interventions in the sensible and memory − resonate in shared consciousness towards contemporary global issues such as diaspora, homeland, and nationality. Not only do both projects illuminate how contemporary art elaborates forms of memory, identity, and production of historical knowledge, but they also reveal a paradigmatic shift from the deconstruction of past narratives to imagining political and ideological alternatives, serving inter alia as a means of rectification and healing.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The memorial at Treblinka: designed by Adam Haupt and Franciszek Duszenko, dedicated in 1964. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin: designed by Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold, dedicated: 2005.

2 Before the Holocaust, over 1,500 Jewish communities (of above 100 people each) existed in Poland, and around 2,000-2,500 Jewish cemeteries, which in the hierarchy of the religious institutions of Judaism, are the most important. A significant portion of the Jewish cemeteries has been destroyed during WWII. Under German occupation in Poland, Jewish gravestones were put to work to pave sidewalks, courtyards, roads, river courses, etc. (Bergman and Iagielski 2014). After WWII the destruction of Jewish cemeteries continued, and the Jewish cemeteries became sites of quarries for the local population and were subjected to vandalism, grave robbing, and plundering of headstones. Until the late 1960's the Jewish community in post-WWII Poland, which amounted around tens of thousands of people (and lived mostly in the main cities), continued to use the cemeteries for burial. Some of the Jewish cemeteries even underwent preservation or restoration aided by local or overseas initiatives, and in some cases, with the collaboration of the Communist authorities. However, after the forced exile of the vast majority of the Jews from Poland in 1968, and the absence of Jewish community or organisations to maintain and preserve these sites, most of the Jewish cemeteries were left abandoned, partially or completely destroyed and ruined. According to the Office for Religious Denominations in Warsaw, of 434 central Jewish cemeteries in Poland, 22 were regarded in 1979 as still in good condition. Of the remaining 412 cemeteries, 68 were half-destroyed during the German occupation; 78 were 90% devastated, and 136 revealed only traces of burial grounds. The other 129 cemeteries were obliterated without a trace (Kania 1988, 22–3).

3 The Jewish population of Poland before World War II and the Holocaust numbered about 3.5 million and was Europe's largest pre-war Jewish community (second in size only to North American Jewry). This community was annihilated under the Nazi occupation and during the war (1939-1945), and further reduced in the subsequent five decades due to anti-Semitism and emigration, so that only a few thousand Jews remain in Poland today.

4 Under Communism, the memory of Jewish life and victimhood was publicly elided, consistent with Poland's longstanding national mythology of victimisation. In post-WWII Poland, under and by Communist rule, the Polish national narrative of martyrdom was heavily promoted, bringing Polish victimhood and martyrdom to the fore, at the cost of eliding Jewish victimhood (Zubrzycki 2013).

5 Such as Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, John Berger, Allen Sekula, Martha Rosler, John Tagg, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Marianne Hirsch.

6 See for example: Sturk 2004, 214–16.

7 An autonomous Muslim organisation tasked by the State to preserve Muslim cemeteries and religious sites.

8 On analogies between the structure of trauma and the medium of photography see Baer 2002; Pollock 2013; Iversen 2017.

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Tehila Sade

Tehila Sade is a lecturer at the Department of the Arts, Ben-Gurion University, Eilat and a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Jewish Art, Bar-Ilan University. She earned her Ph.D. at the Department of the Arts at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her study examined the socio-political and cultural contributions of contemporary artworks that address the memory of Poland's Jews, produced by Polish artists in the twenty-first century. The local contexts are examined through her research on broader frameworks, and further explore the reworking of memory, history, and trauma drawing on the theoretical and critical discourse of East-European and Global art, as well as other disciplines, such as Memory Culture, and Trauma Theory. Her study was awarded the Esther and Sidney Rabb Center for Holocaust and Revival Studies prize (2017). As an art scholar, her research and teaching focus on analysing the capacity of visual art to stimulate a rethinking of national identity, national narratives, and collective memory, shape or reshape political and cultural consciousness, and effect a social change. Tehila is co-editor of Mabatim: Journal of Visual Culture and a member of the Esther and Sidney Rabb Center for Holocaust and Revival Studies Scholars Forum.