THE REPRESENTATION OF HOLOCAUST IN FINE ARTS
The 3 days conference were held between November, 7 -9, in Budapest at the Műcsarnok’s conference room and the Israeli Culture Institute.
The curator of the Conference was Alexandra Reininhaus – Austrian cultural journalist.
In 2010, the French Institute of Budapest initiated a cycle of events about the representation of the Holocaust in fiction. Last year was dedicated to fiction films. The 2011 year deals with the symposium of Fine Arts. It aims to study the evolution between the 1st attempts of the 60’s and the contemporary productions through various techniques of remembrance and trauma treatment, more precisely to capture the difficulty of expressing the inexpressible.
During the 3 days conference, lectures, artists and experts from several countries developed their topic. The conference had simultaneous translations in Hungarian, French and German languages. Among the presentations Prof. Ziva Amisai Maiszles – Department of Art History at the Hebrew University, Israel, Dr. Batia Brutin – Head at the Holocaust Studies Program at he Beit Berl Academic College, Israel and Aviner bar Hama – Artist and a lecturer at the Talpiot College, Israel
Prof. Ziva Amisai Maiszles held her presentation about “The development of reactions to the Holocaust by German and Israeli artist.”
Dr. Batia Brutin spoke about “The visible and concealed responses to the Holocaust in the art of Israeli “second generation” artists.”
Aviner bar Hama gave a lecture on ” All generations should consider themselves as Holocaust survivors.”
The first words counts a lot at an opening and these were the following by Prof. Ziva Amisai Maiszles: ” For the Israelis, the memory of the Holocaust is often more than just a theoretical issue, for us it is a personal story of a relative, a friend or of a neighbor from upstairs”. So it is no wonder than that this collective memory influenced also many in the art.
The works of the below artist can be seen through the side-show:
On the German side: Otto Dix, John Heartfield, George Grosz, GeorgBasekitz, Marcus Lupertz, Sigmar Polke.
On the Israeli side: Jakob Steinhardt, Mordecai Ardon, Marcel Janco, Avigdor Arikha, Samuel Bak, Ygael Tumerkin, Moshe Gershuni, Yocheved Weinfeld.
The lecture included the comparison of the approaches to the Holocaust of the Israeli Haim Maor, Daniel Liebeskind and the German Anselm Kiefer, Micha Ullman.
Needless to add anymore words, the photographs of the paintings tells a lot of the greatest slaughter of mankind, they speak for themselves.
Update and snaps by Agie Reiter
Rolling in Budapest 