Video Installation at Former Concentration Camp

(via e-flux)

"How can the power to imagine historical realities be retained when the survivors of the National Socialist concentration camps are dying out? Who or what will take their place in speaking within the great silence? Among other things, the objects, their objects, that remain / have remained in the soil of the camps. The refuse – which is not refuse at all because it bears the traces of the people in the camps to which the objects belonged. More than twenty thousand objects have been recovered from the soil of Buchenwald – shreds, fragments, evidence of the break in civilization, tangible memories of annihilated existence, but also testimony to attempted self-preservation and resistance. On five monitors, Esther Shalev-Gerz shows five people who have become very close to these objects, five people speaking about their encounters with the objects. In exemplary fashion, she thus gives scope to words evoked as much by the material presence of history in the objects as by the irreco verable absence, the irreversible loss, which surrounds them. Paradigmatically she explores the form post-memorial memory could take.

A native of Vilnius, Lithuania who grew up in Israel, Esther Shalev-Gerz has lived and worked in Paris since 1984. She is internationally recognised for her seminal contributions to the field of art in the public realm and her consistent investigation into the nature of democracy, cultural memory and the politics of public space."

"The Human Aspects of Objects," will open on Friday, August 25, 2006 at 5:00 pm in the depot of the former Buchenwald Concentration Camp.