From Representation to Presence Holocaust in History and Art Museums in Poland and Lithuania

Julija Mockutė University of Amsterdam MA Thesis Heritage Studies: Museum Studies

Graduate School of Humanities

Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture

MA Thesis Heritage Studies: Museum Studies

From Representation to Presence:

Holocaust in History and Art Museums in Poland and Lithuania

Author Julija Mockutė

10605754

[email protected]

Thesis Supervisor Dr. Ihab Saloul

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Second Reader Dr. Boris Noordenbos

[email protected] Date March 1, 2019

Abstract

The Holocaust in Western imagination occupies a special place as a horriﬁc manifestation of modern civilisation. However, in Eastern European countries like Lithuania and Poland the memory of the genocide is seen as an afterthought after the national trauma that was caused by the communist regimes that prevailed over the countries for decades after World War II, despite most of the murders of the Holocaust being carried out in these two countries with fellow nationals mostly as bystanders.

The progress on memory work on the Holocaust has been varied in the two countries, but the struggle is still present as it directly competes with the national narratives that position Lithuanians and Poles as victims of both Nazi and communist regimes. In this thesis I inquire how two national museums in Poland and Lithuania, POLIN, Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the

National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, approach representation of the Holocaust and how they localise it in their national narratives. As many scholars have argued, the Holocaust is impossible to represent, and in this analysis I propose that contemporary art oﬀers an alternative to representation: presence.

In this thesis I show how a temporary exhibition at the National Art Gallery presences the Holocaust by asking the audience to determine for themselves what does the trauma mean for them in the present, rather than trying to represent what actually happened. As national museums are a place where identities are stabilised, such an approach enables the visitors to deﬁne what is their identity together with the works presented, oﬀering a new perspective on how to collectively create meaning and do memory work in museums.

Introduction. Why We Need to Talk About the Holocaust in Museums in Eastern Europe 3 Museum, Nation and Memory 14 POLIN and NDG: Identity Stabilising or Negotiating Belonging? 17 Research Question and Methodology 26 Chapter 1. The Holocaust in the Core Exhibition in POLIN 29 Particularist and Universalist Holocaust Representation Through Testimony and Absence 30 Part of our History, Part of Us: The Localisation of Polish Jews 33 Testimony in the Core Exhibition 41 Spatial Experience and Authenticity in the Holocaust Gallery 44 Chapter 2. Presence of Trauma at Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond in NDG 48 Encountered Sign and Aﬀective Knowledge 49 Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond 53 Dialogue and Viewing 57 Diﬀerent Knowledges and Embodied Experience 60 Multidirectional memory 63 Chapter 3. Spatial Temporality and the Holocaust 68 Conclusion 74 Bibliography 80 Appendix 86 Appendix 1: Images of POLIN 86 Appendix 2: Images of NDG 89 Appendix 3: Interview with Eglė Mikalajūnė on Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond 96 Appendix 4: Interview with Vytenis Burokas on Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond 99 Appendix 5: Interview with Kamila Radecka-Mikulicz on POLIN and Holocaust gallery 103 Appendix 6: Email from Joanna Fikus on POLIN temporary exhibitions 108

1 2 Introduction. Why We Need to Talk About the Holocaust in Museums in Eastern Europe

In the Stockholm Declaration the Holocaust was established as a common European memory: as the biggest atrocity produced by modernity, which should be remembered in order for it to ‘never again’ happen. However, in Eastern Europe this view is not commonplace, despite many countries signing the declaration after the fall of the Communist bloc. There are many reasons why this memory failed to be adopted as it was in the Western European context, including the emergence of communist regimes that ruled in most Eastern European countries after World War II and the understanding of the Holocaust being very diﬀerent in countries like Lithuania and Poland compared to the West. But the main reason, I would argue, is the incompatibility between the national narratives of Lithuania and Poland and the idea of the Holocaust as the biggest trauma of the modern world. These nations each cast themselves as victims, following the double trauma of the Nazi occupation and the Soviet regime. Thus, acknowledging the collaboration of Polish and Lithuanian nationals in the Holocaust feels like a direct threat to their national identities.

Aleida Assmann1 argues that the main obstacle for the memory of the Holocaust becoming universal is the communist regime that reigned over Eastern Europe for half of the twentieth century

(2010: 108).2 Theodor Adorno3 argued that the communist system, which was undemocratic and economically constraining, resulted in a politically immature post-Soviet individual (1986: 124). One could rephrase this by saying that there has not been enough time for ‘memory work’.4 It was not until the 1980s that a discussion of the signiﬁcance of the Holocaust became prominent in the West

– more than thirty years after the event; and, since memory work is suppressed in totalitarian regimes, post-communist countries could only start ‘working through’ in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Lithuania the topic of involvement in the Holocaust resurfaced in the public sphere in 2016 through literature and public events, but as a framework for interpreting the

1 In The Holocaust: A Global Memory? Extensions and Limits of a New Memory Community (2010)

2 Under Bolshevik rule the Holocaust was not discussed as a speciﬁc and unique event but rather as just one more fascist crime, with no emphasis on the tragedy having mainly targeted Jewish communities. The idea of singling out one ethnic group as the primary victim was incompatible with the universal, anti-nationalist ideology of communism.

3 In What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean? (1986)

4 Memory work is the act of negotiating between diﬀerent parties in a society (historians, government oﬃcials, civil society, artists) on what is remembered and forgotten in the group cultural memory, on which national narratives are partly based on.

3 Holocaust already exists, the memory work is very diﬀerent. According to Joanna Wawrzyniak and

Malgorzata Pakier5, the academic discussion of the Holocaust was mostly developed in the ﬁeld of memory studies, which is a discipline that was mainly created in the West,6 for a Western population

(2013: 260). Since their independence, and due to the subsequent de-Sovietisation, countries such as Lithuania and Poland have been very nationally oriented. Extensive memory work has been done since 1990 on the experience of the Soviet occupation and the accompanying crimes, but the

Holocaust memory has not been considered as a priority (Wawrzyniak and Pakier, 2013: 262). As the academic and political discussions around the Holocaust have been ‘monopolised’ and instrumentalised by the West, it has resulted in resistance when introduced in a different context, where they can be seen as cultural colonisation. However, the discussion of the Holocaust should be different in Eastern Europe as the Holocaust was carried out very differently there. In Western Europe

Jews were excluded and marginalised and later deported to Eastern Europe. The Holocaust as the mass extermination of Jews mainly happened in Poland and Lithuania.7 It was carried out in these countries under the eyes of its nationals, resulting in the manifestation of an extremely complex and diﬃcult memory of the event. The foreignness of the discussion on the Holocaust, together with the diﬀerent experiences of the events, explains the incompatibility of the ‘never again’ narrative in

Lithuania and Poland and results in the need for memory work to be done in the present and in a localised way.

5In ‘Memory Studies In Eastern Europe: Key Issues And Future Perspectives’ (2013)

6 Western Europe, North America and in this case Israel. The hegemony on Holocaust interpretation from the West crossovers to other ﬁelds from academia: the idea of “human rights” is directly connected to Western enlightenment philosophers, while “crime against humanity”, now used in international law is a consequence of Holocaust studies (Assmann, 2010: 109). The spread of these concepts, as something everyone has to be held accountable for, could be seen as an example of Western domination, as countries that want to join the European Union or the United Nations have to comply with them. Furthermore, if a country does not recognise Holocaust, it is to be perceived not yet in ‘modernity’ in Judith Butler’s terms (Assmann, 2010: 108).

7 Not only did the biggest percentage of the local Jewish populations not survive World War II but Jews from other countries were brought to these Eastern European countries to be murdered. This was because most of the concentration camps where in Poland and the mass shooting sites were in Lithuania. These mass shootings, referred to as ‘Holocaust by bullets’ are not as widely known in the West as the concentration camps of Poland. However, this was how the Holocaust was mainly carried out in the Eastern European countries, with villages all around Poland and Lithuania having mass graves where all the local Jews were shot. In Paneriai and the Ninth Fort in Lithuania local Jews and those brought from countries such as Germany were murdered en masse. These shootings were more visible to the local communities than what was happening in concentration camps, and local people were enlisted to carry out the killings, resulting in a completely different collective memory of the event (Van der Laarse, 2013). The reasons for the different conceptions of the Holocaust in Eastern and Western Europe were the actions by Nazis and the different levels of assimilation of the Jewish communities in Western European countries and in Lithuania and Poland. The Nazi government decided there would be less public outcry if the mass- murders were to be carried out in these countries, where, not so coincidentally, the biggest concentration of Jews in Europe lived, making it a convenient choice logistically (‘IX Fort Memorial’). Moreover, compared to Germany, the Jewish communities were less assimilated in Poland and Lithuania, which lead to widespread anti-Semitism based on Catholic myths, as well as in Lithuania the myth of the Bolshevik-Jew that betrayed Lithuania in the first Soviet occupation (Torbakov, 2011).

4 It was evidently not possible to engage in a meaningful discussion on the topic during Soviet times, and it has even been diﬃcult to have these conversations since the countries regained independence in the 1990s. Through this research I argue that this is due to the double trauma of the totalitarian communist regime and the Holocaust in parallel. According to Wawrzyniak and Pakier

(2013) and Rob Van der Laarse8 (2013), the traumatic past of communism is still very present in

Lithuania and Poland, which hinders the possibility of acknowledging and being sympathetic with other traumas. Most inhabitants of Lithuania and Poland have lived through the occupation, and the next generation is ‘traumatised’ by it through post-memory – a concept Marianne Hirsch identiﬁes as a traumatic memory passed on to the descendants of the trauma survivors in The Generation of

Postmemory (2008). According to Stefan Rohdewald9, remembrance of the Holocaust is marginalised, or employed to reinforce the national narrative of victimhood. The Soviet trauma is still prominent in the present, both in culture, with museums such as the Museum of Occupations and

Freedom Fights focusing on Soviet oppression of the soviets,10 and in politics, with individuals that were victims of the communist regime receiving reparations from the government and collaborators being barred from actively participating in politics. The Holocaust, on the other hand, is seen as a trauma with only victims, most of whom have died, leaving the conversation one-sided and peripheral.

There are memorials and museums dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust in Eastern

European countries, yet most are in provincial areas and, according to Rohdewald, are an afterthought of commemorating the ‘core nation’s’ victims of the Communist regime (Rohdewald,

2008: 181).11 After the collapse of the Soviet Union, post-Socialist states had to create a new identity as a way of legitimising the contemporary boundaries of the nation-state. This was accomplished through the creation of an overpowering national narrative, based on the selective

8 In Beyond Auschwitz? Europe’s Terrorscapes in the Age of Postmemory (2013)

9 In Post-Soviet Remembrance of the Holocaust and National Memories of the Second World War in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania (2008)

10 The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights is on one of the main streets in Vilnius, Lithuania. It is dedicated to the genocide of Lithuanians under the Soviet regime. The museum is in the building which was the previous headquarters for both the Gestapo and KGB, yet the victims of the Holocaust have only one room in the exhibition, which does not even focus speciﬁcally on the Jewish communities’ losses. The permanent display consists of a KGB prison, the yard where death sentences were implemented and an exhibition on the repressions of the Soviet regime.

11 An example of such marginalisation is the term ‘Holomodor’ being used for a famine in Ukraine that was caused by Stalin’s policies, appropriating the word ‘Holocaust’ for the characterisation of their own victimhood (Rohdewald, 2008: 177)

5 remembrance of history: “in remembering ‘the glorious dead’, ‘imagined communities’ have been

(re-)invented since perestroika” (Rohdewald, 2011: 173). Rogers Brubaker12 classiﬁes the post-Soviet states as nationalising, meaning that their national narrative is based on the idea of the existence of a ‘core nation’, which has rightful ownership of the country. This results in the nationalisation of cultural, political and even academic life, all of which contribute to the shaping of the memory of the

Holocaust. The ‘core nations’ are perceived as victims of the oppressive regimes that have ruled them and their land for half a century, thus heavily basing the countries’ national narrative on the perception of themselves as victims (Rohdewald, 2011). Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider13 explain that collective memory is usually created in relation to a social group, most often a nation (2002:

465). As Holocaust memory crosses national boundaries and could even be seen as a basis for cosmopolitan memory, when the collective memory is based on the idea of a ‘core nation’ the proliferation of a transnational memory fails. As Sznaider and Levy argue, the remembrance of the

Holocaust as a cosmopolitan memory is based on acknowledging the pain of the ‘Other’, thereby diﬀusing the boundaries between perpetrator and victim and resulting in a shared agreement of

‘never again’ (2002: 467). As most post-Soviet countries developed nationalising identities based on the idea of a ‘core nation’, any recognition of an ‘other’ is unlikely, since the idea of the Holocaust as the greatest tragedy of the modern world, with its main victims being Jews, is in direct competition to the narrative of post-Soviet countries as victims of both communism and fascism. Many

Lithuanians and Poles participated in the mass-murder of Jews – a fact which, if recognised, would contradict the narrative of victimhood. Remembering the Holocaust, therefore, often disregards the collaboration of locals with the Nazi occupiers and presents the Holocaust as one of several tragedies that happened to the ‘core nation’, creating a nationalistic distortion of the trauma, described in Rūta Vanagaitė’s book Mūsiškiai (2016: 280). Jeffrey C. Alexander14 claims that through the process of constructing cultural traumas – the memory work done to conceptualise them – social groups like nations can not only identify human suffering but also take responsibility. And through this process the definition of who belongs to the ‘core nation’ can be revised: “insofar as traumas are

12 In Nationalizing states revisited: projects and processes of nationalization in post-Soviet states (2011)

13 In Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory (2002)

14 In Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma (2004)

6 so experienced, and thus imagined and represented, the collective identity will become signiﬁcantly revised. This identity revision means that there will be a searching re-remembering of the past, for memory is not only social and ﬂuid but deeply connected to the contemporary sense of the self.” (Alexander, 2004: 22) To remember the Holocaust in Eastern Europe thus is not just to commemorate it, but to include the Jewish community and other minorities into the ‘core nation’, revising what the ‘core nation’ is.

In 2016 Rūta Vanagaitė published Us (Mūsiškiai), a book in two parts, dealing with the collaboration of Lithuanians with the Nazi occupiers in perpetrating the Holocaust. The ﬁrst part reviews the history of who and how the murders were carried out by the local population, while the second contains dialogues between the author and Efraim Zuroﬀ, a Nazi hunter, as they visit the grave sites where Jews were killed in Lithuania. Reviews of the book have been mixed, with some thanking the author for bringing up the topic in accessible language for the general public, while others claim the author was bribed by the Jewish elite to diminish Lithuania ("MŪSIŠKIAI - knyga, sukrėtusi Lietuvą! Skandalingas liudijimas apie tai, kas Lietuvoje iš tikrųjų žudė žydus, Rūta

Vanagaitė: Knyga [9786090122082]"). In the West, especially within the Jewish community, the author has been praised for uncovering this overlooked topic, with the Conference of European

Rabbis presenting her with an award for shedding light on Lithuanian civilian collaboration with the

Nazi project. However, in Lithuania the reactions have been less positive, with many people discrediting her whole book due to a remark she made while promoting her subsequent autobiography. She claimed that Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, a general in the partisan ﬁght against the Soviets considered a hero in contemporary Lithuania, had collaborated with the KGB

(adding that Zuroﬀ believes he took part in the Holocaust as he belonged to a group that assisted the Nazis). The Lithuanian journalist and bestselling author Andrius Tapinas demanded that Alma

Littera, the publisher of both his and Vanagaitė’s books, withdraw Us from bookshops. The same day the publisher declared it was taking all Vanagaitė’s works out of circulation. This led to the author losing her main source of income, as Us was removed from the shelves. This reaction shows how, in

Lithuania, talking about Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust is still a sensitive, if not taboo, topic. Vanagaitė infringed upon the narrative of the heroic resistance to the Soviet regime, and the

7 consequences were dire. In an interview with Masha Gessen, the author said that in the street people would call her “pro-Putin whore” after her comment about the partisan general, leading her to leave the country, and later to return to face prosecution (even though no oﬃcial charges have been brought) (Gessen, 2017). The book was withdrawn not due to government pressure but by what could be considered civil society. At the time, Tapinas was one of the most popular writers in the country, with a crowd-funded late-night talk show, representing many Lithuanians, who live in constant fear of Russia and regard everything that does not correspond to the narrative positioning

Lithuanians as victims of both the Soviet and Nazi occupations as anti-patriotic. In 2018, referring to the discussion of the Holocaust, the government said there was nothing more that needed to be added, as Lithuania as a country has a constant and rich dialogue with the Lithuanian and international Jewish communities. In response to a suggestion by the European Jewish Congress to fundamentally review the role of Lithuanians in the Nazi occupation and to stop respecting those who collaborated with the occupiers and actively contributed to the killing of Jews in Lithuania,

Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis said that only historians could look into the topic as they would look at the facts rather than interpretation. He claimed Lithuania had done everything to maintain a good relationship between the country and the Jewish community (‘Lietuvai Nereikia Peržiūrėti

Pozicijos Dėl Lietuvių Vaidmens per Holokaustą’). However, this could be easily disputed, as the legislation of memory in Lithuania is very signiﬁcant, with Nikolay Koposov in Memory Laws, Memory

Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia calling the Lithuanian Law “an extreme example of the tendency to use memory laws to promote national narratives and shift the blame for crimes against humanity to others” (Koposov, 2018: 72). These laws were enacted in the prosecution of a

Lithuanian diplomat who said that the Russian forces that attacked unarmed citizens in January 1991 were aided by Lithuanian collaborators.15 The conversation on the Holocaust can infringe this law as it challenges the narrative of Lithuanians as victims of the Nazi regime. Thus the rethinking of the

Holocaust has not been very successful in Lithuania since its independence from the Soviet Union and, from a policy perspective, will not be in the near future as the current ruling party bases its ideology on a very traditional and nationalistic perception of Lithuanian identity. However, the topic is

15On 13 January 1991, in an already independent Lithuania, Russian tanks drove into the city of Vilnius and tried to occupy the Television Tower, the radio and television headquarters and the parliament. Unarmed civilians stood in front of the buildings to defend them, leaving 13 dead. It is one of the most important remembrance days for Lithuanians.

8 being picked up by writers, such as Vanagaitė, institutions and in the art sector, signalling the possibility of change.

The topic of the perpetration of the Holocaust is surfacing in diﬀerent public spaces in

Lithuania: the arts, civil society and museums. For example, the summer of 2018 saw ‘the wrap’ on the ﬁrst Lithuanian ﬁlm on the subject, Isaac (‘Filmo “Izaokas” Kūrėjai: Turime Susitaikyti Su Savo

Tautos Istorija’). In 2016 Lithuania’s ﬁrst Stolpersteins16 were installed in the old town of Vilnius. In

2016 a ‘Memory March’ was organised in the town of Molėtai, with over a 1000 people marching to commemorate the murder of the Jewish population there (Antanavičius, 2016). In Šeduva, another small town, the construction of a museum, The Lost Shtetl, is due to be ﬁnished in 2020 (Šiuparys,

2018). In May 2018 the Museum of Genocide Victims was renamed the Museum of Occupations and

Freedom Fights in response to criticism of its misrepresentation of genocide and speciﬁcally the diminishing of the Holocaust in comparison to Soviet crimes against ethnic Lithuanians (Beniušis,

2017). These small steps show a tendency within civil society and cultural institutions to start talking about the Holocaust in Lithuania through a more critical lens rather than just victimhood.

In Poland the situation is a bit diﬀerent. Paweł Śpiewak, the Director of the Jewish Historical

Institute in Warsaw, told a Lithuanian newspaper that a reinterpretation of World War II had been underway for the last 20 years in Poland, while in Lithuania it started only a couple of years ago with the release of Vanagaitė’s book (‘Žydų Ir Holokausto Istoriją Tiriantys Lenkai Ragina Aktyviau

Įsitraukti Ir Lietuvius’). A book that had a similar impact in Poland, Jan Gross’s Neighbors: The

Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland was published in 2001. The opening of

POLIN, a museum exclusively dedicated to the history of Polish Jews is a great example, as it was the result of a long process. The Holocaust has also been portrayed in ﬁlm, as in the Oscar-winning

Ida, directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, which was the ﬁrst ﬁlm to depict a Polish character admitting to killing Jews.17 However, the most recent developments in the Polish government and civil society suggest a regression in the memory work. In 2018, with an absolute majority in parliament, the ruling party adopted a law making it illegal to state publicly that the Polish government or nation is guilty of

16 Initiated by German artist Gunter Demnigs, small concrete cubes with brass plates, bearing the names and dates of victims of Nazi persecution, are set in front of the places they last lived or worked freely (‘Home’; ‘Vilniaus Senamiesčio Grindiniuose Holokausto Aukas Įamžino “Atminimo Akmenys”’). Stolpersteins are crowdfunded; anyone can buy one and install it for a set price, making it a commemoration based on the participation of civil society.

17 The ﬁlm was not as successful in Poland, receiving a similar reaction as in Lithuania.

9 Nazi crimes, or to use the phrase ‘Polish death camps’ (‘Dėl Lenkijos Priimto Holokausto Įstatymo

Izraelis Iškvietė Lenkų Diplomatą’). This entails that Holocaust survivors or witnesses could be punished for their testimonials, if the Institute of National Remembrance deems it anti-Polish. As the institute states that responsibility for the Holocaust is entirely to be attributed to the German Third

Reich, any claims of Poles having participated in it can be seen as contravening the new law. Initially the punishment was incarceration for up to three years, but, due to international pressure, especially from Israel and Ukraine, the punishment for infringement is now a monetary fine. Anyone making a claim that would break this law through artistic or scientific activities are supposed to be exempt from prosecution. The Polish president, who also had to sign the law, addressed the international condemnation. He argued that, officially, neither Poland nor its people had participated in the

Holocaust but that while a few had been cruel to their Jewish neighbours, he would not allow anyone to diminish the name of Poland and Poles (‘Andrzejus Duda: Lenkija Nedalyvavo Holokauste’). This controversial law shows a shift away from the conversation on the Holocaust in Poland, and it can be seen not only in the government but also in civil society, with fascist remarks on social media and the

National Radical Camp, an ideological descendent of the pre-war anti-Semitic movement in Poland, waving their ﬂags in cities on national holidays (‘Europos Žydų Kongresas: Lenkijoje Antisemitizmas

Tampa Norma’). According to a University of Warsaw study, young Poles were more tolerant of hate speech against Jews in 2016 compared with the statistics of 2014. The passing of the law and the general climate show a growing discontent with the Holocaust being part of the Polish narrative, and suggest that even though progress has been made, especially in scientiﬁc research and with the opening of POLIN, there are still unresolved issues for it to be included in Poland’s national identity.

Igor Torbakov18 argues that instrumentalising and politicising history, which seems to be resurfacing with the adoption of the recent law in Poland, usually has two main objectives: to construct a cohesive national identity and to avoid guilt (2011: 210). These are interconnected, since it is hard to identify with a morally diﬃcult past. In the European memory of World War II, Torbakov says there are three narratives: a Western European one, which could be said to be realised through the Stockholm Declaration, the Soviet one, which is mainly followed by Russia as the only country

18 In History, Memory and National Identity: Understanding the Politics of History and Memory Wars in Post-Soviet Lands (2011)

10 that identiﬁes with the Soviet Union, and the Eastern European one (2011: 214). The ﬁrst two similarly interpret the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sides during the war: the ‘good’ Allies and ‘bad’ Nazi

Germany. However, in Eastern Europe the main trauma that is focused on is not the Nazi occupation but rather the subsequent communist regime and its crimes. This is due to the communist regimes having lasted ten times longer and pervading the lives of multiple generations. However, as I have shown before, the interpretation of the war by Western Europe and Russia has become a basis for a pan-European and transnational history through the proliferation of the term ‘never again’. The devastating narrative of Eastern Europe should be included in the general European historical narrative as it is done in books like Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

(2012), which contextualises the experience of the war in Eastern Europe by looking at how the Nazi and Soviet regimes abused the lands in between them. However, the West’s nostalgia for and idealisation of the Soviet regime, as exempliﬁed by Adidas having to withdraw Soviet-themed shirts in Lithuania (‘Adidas Withdraws Soviet-Themed Shirt in Lithuania’), shows that the memory of the crimes committed by the Soviet regime is not internalised beyond the borders of Eastern Europe.

The swastika is banned from public spaces in most countries while the hammer and sickle is a fashionable accessory (Fedorova, n.d.). Eastern Europeans thus push to integrate their traumatic experience of the Soviet terror into the general European narrative – in part by making it central in the construction of their national identity. However, this often leads to an emphasis on this tumultuous time in their political history, as Torbakov explains: “Most Eastern European nations now view the wartime and postwar period as a ‘useable past’ – crucial for strengthening separate identity, giving a boost to populist nationalism, externalising the Communist past, and casting their particular nation as a hapless victim of two bloodthirsty totalitarian dictatorships.” (2011: 215). This national narrative of victimhood excludes the idea that the Eastern European nationals themselves could have done anything wrong, as every action can be justiﬁed as self-defence. Therefore, the narrative of the

Holocaust, or more speciﬁcally perpetrating it, becomes incompatible with that of the nation and is forced out of the public sphere, whether by the government or civil society.

Michael Rothberg in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of

Decolonization (2009) devised a new framework for memory in which it should not be perceived as a

11 zero-sum game: if someone’s past is acknowledged, it does not mean the other’s should not be.

Rothberg argued that rather than marginalising other traumas, cross-referencing and borrowing in memory work is productive rather than diminishing, as it enables subordinated memory traditions to be recognised as well. However, this does not work in only one way; the process of ‘memory conflict’, where different traumas are negotiated, is dialectical. As an example, Rothberg (2009) suggests that Holocaust memory has been used as a way of talking about other cultural traumas, while Holocaust memory itself was mobilised by de-colonialism and thus traumas of slavery and colonialism. The final conclusion of Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory reiterates

Alexander’s (2004) idea that, through negotiation, traumatic memory and group identity can be reshaped and expanded. Furthermore, collective memory is created in the first place, coming into being through memory work, by negotiating which memories are worthy of remembrance. Thus multidirectional memory enables solidarity with overlooked groups within the nation, rather than diminishing the ‘core nation’s’ memories. With the difficulties that the double trauma of communism and Nazism impose in remembering the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, multidirectional memory seems like a way of incorporating the trauma of the Holocaust in the national narrative and thus expanding the definition of who belongs to the nation or what constitutes it.

The art piece that inspired this research was Kader Attia’s cinematographic poem entitled

Reﬂecting Memory (2016), which I saw at the National Art Gallery of Lithuania in Vilnius (Nacionalinė

Dailės Galerija [from here on referred to as NDG]). This artwork was part of the exhibition, Citynature:

Vilnius and Beyond, one of the case studies of this thesis. Attia’s 48-minute work compares a phantom limb to a cultural trauma. Surgeons, neurologists and psychoanalysts are interviewed about the ‘phantom limb’, which is when an amputee still feels the amputated limb. Specific to humans, the feeling of the phantom limb is compared to dub music – a genre originating in Jamaica that is based on the subtraction of sound. These physical and audio presentations of absence, referencing personal and collective traumas, compare physical and immaterial pain, which point to the traumas of contemporary history, such as the Holocaust, but also colonialism and communist dictatorships, and the inability to repair them by refusing to acknowledge them. While making the work, Attia asked the curators of the exhibition to find experts from different fields: doctors, psychotherapists, cultural

12 studies scholars and also priests who could be interviewed on themes like physical, psychological and cultural traumas. This was done both globally and in reference to Vilnius, as he wanted to react to the history of the city. Due to illness, he asked a colleague to ﬁlm abandoned locations in Vilnius to add to the video work. Attia then edited the interviews with scientists and dub musicians, images of abandoned places and people with amputated limbs, creating an image of them in mirrors. The

ﬁnal result was a cinematographic poem comparing a personal physical trauma to a loss within a community, or cultural trauma – whether slavery in Jamaica or the Holocaust in Vilnius. This work is a commendable example of multidirectional memory and encourages visitors to realise the productivity and urgency of speaking about this topic in the Eastern European context today.

To carry out research on the presentation of the Holocaust in an art space I chose to compare it to a more traditional place to represent it: a historical museum. As a celebrated museum that incorporates the history of the Holocaust in Poland into their narrative, POLIN was chosen as the historical example. In their permanent exhibition, called Core Exhibition, the Holocaust is presented as one of the chapters in the history of Polish Jews. The Core Exhibition consists of eight diﬀerent chapters that take the visitor through 1000 years of history. Visitors are told the story of the arrival, prosperity and almost complete annihilation of the Jewish community in Poland from the

Middle Ages to today. It begins with a ﬁctional legend that inspired the name of the museum and

ﬁnishes with contemporary times, which often continues in the temporary exhibitions. Thus I chose to compare POLIN’s Core Exhibition and the Holocaust chapter with NDG’s exhibition Citynature:

Vilnius and Beyond and Kader Attia’s Reflecting Memory. As the museum is one of the few spaces where the discussion on Holocaust is resurfacing in both countries, and national museums play a part in national identity construction, a comparison of representations of Holocaust in different spaces can allow for an inquiry in how the discussion on the Holocaust can influence the national narrative and vice versa.

13 Museum, Nation and Memory

The creation of museums is inherently connected to the nation state. Hans Belting19 identiﬁes museums as places where collective memory lies, as past time is ‘stored’ there. Andreas Huyssen20 links the creation of nationhood and museums. In the nineteenth century, when the ﬁrst museums were starting to be established, nation states were in the process of shaping their national histories so that they would create and legitimise the nation state itself (Huyssen, 2003: 2). In Imagined

Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson uses his concept of ‘imagined community’ to describe the nation as a unity that exists in the imagination of its constituents. Individuals create their community by believing themselves to belong to it (1998). This

‘imagining’ of a nation is based, among other things, on remembering (and selectively forgetting) a shared, common past. Kevin Walsh21 argues that by presenting heritage as an objective representation of the past museums are key in rationalising the past (1992: 176), and thus the imagination of the nation itself.

Although Anderson’s deﬁnition of nation as ‘imagined community’ might suggest the imagining was done in the past, in reality the nation state is constantly being reimagined, and so are museums, both their narratives and how they are presented. However, in museum presentations there might often seem to be a sense of continuity, as collective memory is constantly being updated to match present views, as David Lowenthal explains in Fabricating Heritage (1998: 16). Belting calls the museum an ‘autopia’ – a place where identity is stabilised through the process of updating (2001:

78). However, identity is not just updated (or remembered) but rather invented in the ﬁrst place. Julia

D. Harrison22 claims that tradition, history and individual expression all play a part in this process, and the understanding of it takes place in museums, where representations of identity are created

(1994: 163). This can be presented in the form of heritage, itself often created rather than preserved from the past, which usually serves better for the transmission of the identity than a historical object

(Lowenthal, 1998: 14). It is not surprising then that the belief in heritage as attesting to (national)

19 In Place Of Reﬂection Or Place Of Sensation? (2001)

20 In Present Pasts (2003)

21 In The Representation Of The Past (1002)

22 In Ideas Of Museums In The 1990s (1994)

14 identity is based on belief rather than rational proof (ibid.: 7). Thus, the purpose of heritage is not to learn something but rather to become something – to connect to the identity that the heritage represents. To facilitate this connection and create strong community bonds, the representation is often based in prejudiced pride in ‘our past’ (ibid.: 8). The denomination of ‘our’ also creates an ‘ingroup’ and an outsider group, or the Other. The national museum, whether or not it employs heritage

(although heritage is the most often used tool), shapes national identity through representation while legitimising the nation state itself as a place to make memory accessible. Walsh argues that the

‘successes’ of heritage must be evaluated in the present, where post-material values are developed and the nation state and its power are being threatened (1992). Memory is everywhere now, which could be understood as an outcome of the uncertainty that rapid globalisation poses to stable identities, and it is becoming a way to anchor oneself (Huyssen, 2003: 18). Huyssen argues that in the past our lives were neatly organised through the structures of family, community, nation and state. These structures, especially in the Western world, have been weakened, with national memories and histories losing their grounding in politics and geography: “this may mean that these groundings are written over, erased, and forgotten, as the defenders of local heritage and authenticity lament. Or it may mean that they are being renegotiated in the clash between globalising forces and new productions and practices of local cultures.” (ibid.: 4) In the case of countries like

Lithuania or Poland, where the nation state is relatively young compared to the countries of Western

Europe, and they have experienced dictatorship and oppression, they are faced with the task of creating a national narrative and memory in a time when they are being challenged, and throughout it to ﬁnd ways to deal with past wrongs through commemoration or other means (ibid.: 16).

What can or should museums do now, in this changing world? There are two speciﬁc points in which the museum faces fundamental, interrelated choices: is it dedicated primarily to preservation or presentation, and is it a research institution or does it serve the public?23 Harrison says that museums must not just present collections, but, more importantly, they must present ideas

(1994: 164). And, to be successful, Walsh argues that a museum must be based on the idea of local democracy; it must involve the public through education and interactive displays and create a

23 In reality, they are not mutually exclusive, but I am choosing to divide them into categories, since the way each is prioritised aﬀects the policy of the museum.

15 dialogue with the displays. More importantly, the public must be involved in the production of their own pasts and the production of the displays themselves (1992: 161). The museum is not (and never was) supposed to simply transmit knowledge, but should be a place where it is created for and by the visitors through dialogue and experience. The contemporary world is crucial in these presentations, as people want to see manifestations of their own world (Belting, 2001: 73). Belting says this kind of approach makes it possible to present exhibitions based on theme, which challenges the previous notions of ownership in the museum: “exhibitions of a new kind which placed the ownership of a museum in a new light; not in the light of art history, but that of a society concerned with itself.”24 (2001: 76). So a ‘new’ museum is supposed to present ideas that have been created by and for the public, a place where people can engage with their own culture and see what has been forgotten in the process of nationalising the museums.

One of the approaches to this is through experience. As everything around is being commoditised, what is missed are experiences, which Joseph Pine and James Gilmore25 describe as

“memorable events that engage them in an inherently personal way.” (2007: 76) This is often achieved through authenticity, which museums must be able to render (Pine and Gilmore, 2007: 76).

Through photography, or the mechanisation of making images, Walter Benjamin26 claims that art has changed its evaluation from authenticity and aura to politics and reproducibility. In other words, it is not due to the artistic quality of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa that it is often considered the best painting in the world but to the ubiquity of the image. With growing access to internet, when most of a museum’s artefacts and images can be accessed online, often on its own website, why should people pay money to go inside the museum and see what they have on show? It could be said that creating an experience is the way to do it, and especially embodied experience, which Pine and

Gilmore say is to be done through architecture (2007). Pine and Gilmore are talking about spatial experience, as the visitor must be in the space, but the experience is still perceived through sight rather than the body. I argue that spatial experience, although useful as a term, excludes information perceived through senses other than sight and thus excludes many aspects of how to approach

24 I would argue that this applies for all kinds of museums, but, instead of art history, in an archaeological museum it would be archaeology; in a historical museum it would be history, etc.

25 In Museums & Authenticity (2007)

26 In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1992)

16 experience in an exhibition, as embodied experience is crucial in creating a dialogue with the audience through diﬀerent knowledges, which I will discuss in detail in chapter 2.27 Belting sees the future of museums similarly, arguing for “more space for reﬂection and the critical public than the experience-hungry visitor” (2001: 75).

POLIN and NDG: Identity Stabilising or Negotiating Belonging?

In their mission statements POLIN and NDG show that they are engaged with the ideas of New

Museology and critically examine their role as national and also city-related museums. However, their conclusions on the museum’s role in contemporary society are quite different, which is unsurprising considering that one is a historical museum and the other is devoted to art. However, despite this fundamental difference, their divergent approaches are due to their visions of how to create the representation of the past they both claim to present to their visitors. Although the museums have different approaches to representing the past, they both claim to represent it, and through that shape the national narrative. POLIN and NDG are national museums, and that entails that their narrative has a dialectical relationship with national identity, each shaping the other. Both of the museums in the exhibitions I have chosen to analyse, Core Exhibition in POLIN and Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond in

NDG, present the Holocaust and attempt to incorporate it into the national narrative. In my research I will inquire how they do it, and how that aﬀects the national narrative. To investigate the way the

Holocaust is represented in the exhibitions, one must look into how the museum constructs narratives in the ﬁrst place, and how it aims to represent the past, which can be done by looking into their mission and vision statements.

POLIN was inspired by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, which opened in 1993.28

However, the JHI decided they did not want another museum of the Holocaust but rather a museum of Jewish life in Poland, with the Holocaust being only a part of it (History: from the Idea, through the

27 Different knowledges as knowledges understood through different senses and different ways of learning.

28 The idea for POLIN originated with the NGO ‘The Association of the Jewish Historical Institute’ (JHI), soon gaining support both locally and abroad. JHI was founded in 1951 to preserve and commemorate the culture and history of Polish Jews. As well as maintaining their library, their current activities are mainly supporting POLIN and the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute. From 1995 work on the project of the museum was carried out as a social initiative. In 2005 it was formally institutionalised by the then president of Poland, Aleksander Kwaśniewski. The ﬁrst public-private initiative in Poland, the museum was created by the NGO that initiated the project, the local government of Warsaw and the national government of Poland. The governmental part was responsible for the building and equipment, while the JHI was in charge of the Core Exhibition. A broad international network was established for both the research and funding of POLIN, together with foundations from the United States, Poland, Great Britain and Germany.

17 Ohel, to the POLIN Museum). This could be interpreted as the localisation of the Holocaust within the national narrative, or rather the localisation of Jews within Polish national history.29 In 1996 the

Committee for Planning the Museum of the History of Polish Jews was established, and they began their work in collaboration with committees all over the world. In 1997 the municipality of Warsaw allocated a site for the museum, to be built in front of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. 1998 marked the start of the programming for the museum, which was a diﬃcult task as there was almost no collection to work with. Thus the idea of making a narrative museum was born, moving away from an indexical way of presentation (apart from the location being indexical). In the years leading up to the establishment of POLIN in 2005, a museum council was created, and London-based design company Event Communications was hired for the design of the Core Exhibition (History: from the

Idea, through the Ohel, to the POLIN Museum). After institutionalising the museum, a contest was held for the architecture of the building, which was won by Rainer Mahlamaki from Finland. In 2009 construction started, with an unoﬃcial opening for representatives of Poland and international guests in 2013, a public opening in 2014, attended by both Polish and Israeli presidents, as well as the mayor of Warsaw.

The recipient of many awards, the museum’s design incorporates many symbols in an attempt to be a ‘museum of life’. Built at the very heart of the former Warsaw ghetto, it faces the

Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, built in 1948, creating a juxtaposition between a monument to remember the dead and a museum to celebrate the living and the life of Poland’s Jews throughout the ages (The Building). The outside of the building is covered with glass panels, on which the word

‘Polin’ is printed, both in Hebrew and Latin letters. Meaning ‘rest here’ in Hebrew, it references the legend of two Jews arriving in Poland 1000 years ago, which is told in the introduction to the Core

Exhibition (ibid.). The interior is also designed with symbolism in mind: walls divide the building in half to show the gap in history – the Holocaust, thus using the trope of portraying absence. At the same time the monumental hall has a massive window looking onto the park and evoking life and that the story of the Jewish people in Poland is not over. A bridge, connecting the two halves of the museum on the ﬁrst ﬂoor, symbolises bringing the past together with the present, which is what the

29 It was rumoured that creating a museum of Jewish history in Poland rather than a museum dedicated solely to the Holocaust made it more diﬃcult to ﬁnd donor funding.

18 museum aims to do. The architecture plays with the dynamic history of both the locale and the broader history of Jews in Poland, calling out the questions that the museum wants to ask its audiences as they approach the museum. As in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, absence is used to represent the Holocaust – the big gap within POLIN’s interior – but there is more focus on the life and prosperity section, as the museum is bright and spacious when one enters it. As in the core exhibition, the Holocaust is only one gallery of eight, the museum’s design shows that it was only a chapter – horrific and crucial to remember, but only a part of the rich history of the Jewish communities in Poland. The building and the design of the exhibition have key roles in conveying the museum’s message, as they attempt to embody it and also make visitors feel they are in the time and place depicted, whether the main message in the hall or the specific moments of history throughout the core exhibition. Both the exterior and interior are successful in conveying the message through experience-based design and offer a different interpretation of the Holocaust from most museums that are specifically dedicated to the genocide, aiming to contextualise it within the still-existing life of Polish Jews and broader Polish society.

POLIN’s innovative re-contextualisation of the Holocaust and more so Poland’s Jewish community has not gone unnoticed in the museum community: POLIN won the European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA 2016). The jury concluded that, “the museum rose to the challenge of creating an engaging and persuasive core exhibition without a substantial collection of artefacts. The programme of temporary exhibitions, educational activities, conferences and academic and artistic residences make the Museum a vibrant platform for dialogue and spreading knowledge of Jewish history and heritage” (About the Museum). Notwithstanding the international praise, however, the museum has encountered disapproval from the local community, as shown by a headline in the tabloid newspaper Super Express, ‘Does POLIN propagate hate speech against Poland?’ (Boruciak,

2016). According to curator Radecka-Mikulicz, the disapproval has not been visible until recently, but since the Institute of Polish Remembrance bill was approved in the Polish parliament there has been a noticeable shift to a more negative reaction. As I will discuss later, the museum talks about the participation of Poles in the Holocaust, thus it can be seen as breaking this law. A concern for the

19 museum and for Holocaust studies in Poland, the law shows a general trend of resistance to incorporating the Holocaust into the narrative of Polish history.

On the website and in the museum, POLIN claims that its mission is “to recall and preserve the memory of the history of Polish Jews, contributing to the mutual understanding and respect amongst Poles and Jews as well as other societies of Europe and the world” (Mission and Vision). I would argue that ‘recall’ here entails memory work, meaning it is up to the museum itself to determine what is to be remembered and preserved. Jean-François Lyotard30 warns that memorialising the Holocaust could lead to its being forgotten, since the function of remembering will be fulﬁlled by memorials and museums. By taking on the task of recalling the memory of Poland’s

Jews, the museum seems to take this work from its audiences. Moreover, it is the memory of Polish

Jews that is to be recalled, to promote understanding between ‘Poles and Jews’, implying a mutual exclusivity. As a national museum is a place where identities are stabilised (Belting, 2001: 78), it could be said that rather than including the Jewish community in the national narrative it reinforces the divisions. However, as there is a tendency in Eastern European countries to overlook Jewish suﬀering during World War II over the ‘core nation’s’ experience, it is important to emphasise the

Jewish experience in the museum, and the inclusion of the Jewish community into the national narrative is done through the narrative of the museum and the use of the deﬁnition of ‘Polish Jews’.

The whole narrative of the core exhibition is about how the Jewish community has lived in the lands that now constitute Poland for over 1000 years and how it has contributed to Polish culture, thus showing that even though they were a distinct group, they have always been part of Poland. Through the centuries a group that can be called ‘Polish Jews’ has developed, implying that the Jewish community was shaped by their compatriots as well. This is particularly visible in the Encounters with

Modernity chapter, which, next to Zionism, presents Jewish groups opposing the idea, with Poland as part of their identity. Thus the mission of POLIN, as I have argued, shows that representing the

Holocaust is problematic within their framework as they claim to do memory work rather than inviting their visitors to do it, but they succeed in localising the Jewish community in Poland without prioritising the ‘core nation’. However, as Kamila Radecka-Mikulicz, senior specialist for core exhibition content and a curator of the museum’s Holocaust gallery, said when I interviewed her,

30 In Heidegger And "The Jews" (1990)

20 POLIN aims to be a museum of the living, not of the Holocaust. Rather than representing the

Holocaust, their goal is to locate the Jewish community in the national narrative of Poland – a goal

POLIN achieves. Radecka-Mikulicz adds that the museum aims to show a common past for the local community, so people understand the history of the Jewish community as an integral part of

Poland’s history, as well as learning from the past in order to live together in the future (Radecka-

Mikulicz and Mockutė). The museum’s vision suggests that, although the Jewish community is not considered part of the ‘core nation’ in Poland, it still was and is an integral part of Polish society.

Lithuania’s National Art Gallery is a subdivision of the Art Museum, which was founded in

1933 as Vilnius City Museum by the Vilnius Magistracy (History of the Lithuanian Art Museum). At the time its collection mainly comprised of works donated from various arts and science societies, which has changed and expanded throughout the years under diﬀerent management. Nowadays the museum comprises nine distinct museums and galleries: Vilnius Picture Gallery, the Clock and Watch

Museum, the Radvilas Palace Museum, the Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum, Pranas Domšaitis Gallery, the Museum of Design and Applied Arts, the Palanga Amber Museum, the Museum of Miniature Arts and the NDG. The Lithuanian Art Museum aims to collect, preserve, research and restore works, as well as organising exhibitions, conferences and educational programmes and publishing catalogues and art books. In 2007 the museum’s collection contained over 204,600 Lithuanian and foreign works of visual and applied art, as well as ethnographic and archaeological collections (History of the

Lithuanian Art Museum). The NDG was opened in 1993 as the National Gallery, in a building that had housed the Museum of the Revolution during the Soviet occupation. Until 1999 it exhibited

Lithuanian folk art, as well as works donated by Vytautas Kašuba (Informacija Lankytojui). Due to the deterioration of the building it was closed in 1999 and reopened in 2009 with a permanent exhibition of twentieth-century Lithuanian art. This is gradually being expanded with works from the twenty-ﬁrst century, and the museum has two spaces for temporary exhibitions that present various modern or contemporary art exhibitions.

The NDG’s stated goal is to collect and research Lithuanian art of the twentieth and twenty-

ﬁrst centuries and present it to Lithuanian and international audiences as part of international modern art culture: “our aim is to study the Lithuanian art heritage of this period, broaden the view of

21 our audiences, reveal the links between Lithuanian art and that of other countries, encourage new interpretations of Lithuanian art and develop a culture of understanding of the visual arts” (Visitor

Information). So its main aim is to gather and research Lithuanian art and present it to local and global audiences, combining the idea of the museum as a research centre and public institution. The focus on a Lithuanian and international audience shows that the museum wants to engage with the national community as the ‘owner’ of the art (Lithuanian art for a Lithuanian audience) but also to show it to audiences outside of the national group, as the collection itself is part of a bigger international framework of modern art. Thus the museum simultaneously reaﬃrms a national belonging while situating it within a larger conﬁguration of nations. One of its curators, Eglė

Mikalajūnė, told me that the museum’s main goal was to maintain and expand the collection so as to diﬀerentiate it from a gallery or kunsthalle. As it presents the collection, the museum inevitably presents the past – reﬂections of the past, connections to the past, especially being a civic museum.

Vilnius’s history has been extremely multicultural, with ethnic Lithuanians becoming a majority only in the second half of the twentieth century. The NDG’s collection is said to be of ‘Lithuanian art’, which could have diﬀerent connotations. The curators of the museum imply that it can be art by both ethnic

Lithuanians and any artists in the geographic location of Lithuania (Mikalajūnė and Mockutė; Burokas and Mockutė). Currently the collection mainly contains artworks by ethnic Lithuanians, but they are working on expanding the collection to broaden the notion of Lithuanian art, including art from Polish and Jewish minorities that have been a strong presence in the nation’s cultural landscape throughout the ages. However, due to a lack of funding the collection is not expanding much (Burokas and

Mockutė). The temporary exhibitions are funded separately through applications for project-based support (Mikalajūnė and Mockutė), giving them greater scope to acquire and exhibit art from outside the collection.

Mikalajūnė sees the museum as having a duty to present the past as a subject. As the permanent exhibition presents Lithuanian art chronologically, it is up to the temporary exhibitions, often of contemporary art, to fulﬁl this role, either by connecting Lithuanian art to international trends

(one of the museum’s main goals) or by connecting art from diﬀerent periods, both locally and internationally. The goal of establishing oneself in reference to art from other parts of the world,

22 which, when talking about modern art especially, means Western art, echoes the inferiority complex of nationalising nations. However, as oﬃcial institutions, museums, especially those outside the

West, must represent and engage with the concepts of modernity and contemporary and global life, as their role is to represent them, through their collection, for the local audience, as Hans Belting says in Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age: "they must therefore oﬀer a program which, in this case, clariﬁes the constellation and local meaning of modern, contemporary, and global” (Belting, 2012: 21). Consequently, while most exhibitions focus on the locale, the curators are keen to connect their narrative to global issues. These connections are mainly made in the temporary exhibitions, which often work with contemporary art, and not only bring a global perspective to the status of Lithuanian art but contextualise the art and the topics that are addressed.

To understand the approach of the temporary exhibitions, the museum’s educational role should be examined. Indeed, the education centre has a central role in the museum, as it attempts to make the museum an active and interesting place for communication, where audiences can meet artists, curators and museum staﬀ. During the educational programmes, which include excursions, workshops and meetings, audiences can learn how artworks are created and come to be exhibited or added to the museum’s collection, as well as gaining a critical insight into art processes and their inﬂuence on everyday life (Education). The aim is that the visitor thoroughly enjoys, critically evaluates and understands the artworks on show. The NDG sees ‘reading’ visual art as important as reading and writing; thus every participant in the activities is encouraged to get to know and interpret their own creativity (ibid.). By stressing the importance of this kind of education the museum implies that they expect the visitor to participate in its meaning-creation, with the museum merely providing

‘tools’ with which to engage with the exhibitions.

The NDG’s contemporary exhibitions run parallel to the goals of the education centre.

Another curator, Vytenis Burokas, says that, as most art spaces in Europe have been doing for a while, the museum is moving away from the ‘white cube’ presentation that shows artworks as hierarchical, autonomous, modernist projects, to a more educational role, where the artwork is used as a medium to create dialogue on our contemporary condition (Burokas and Mockutė). That does not mean moving away from the artwork itself, but, since much contemporary art engages with

23 current social issues, it inevitably leads to reﬂection of these topics by the audience as well. Artists have diﬀerent approaches as to how open and topical they wish to be towards the audience, but, for

Burokas, it is the role of the curator of a museum as a national institution to address the viewers and bring them into the exhibition’s narrative. Mikalajūnė identified the role of curator as special in its relation to knowledge, as it does not have the constraints of academia or the scientific method. The creation of knowledge works in between research and creativity, which allows for experimentation and unexpected conclusions. As the curating profession is moving away from art history to different

ﬁelds of academia and non-academic approaches, a space for new meanings and ideas is created.

Indeed, the NDG’s mission statement includes activities that imply reciprocal interaction, so that, rather than informing or presenting, the museum aims to give its visitors the tools to understand what they are being shown. Thus, notwithstanding its responsibility to maintain and research its collection, the NDG wants its audience to invest the meaning itself, as Belting says contemporary museums should (2001).

POLIN and the NDG have very different mission statements. Their collections are of different sizes and their approaches to the creation of meaning are different. POLIN is a historical museum, while the NDG is an art museum. It is therefore understandable that their collections differ: POLIN has barely any artefacts, while the NDG has a vast collection of artworks; it “collects and researches its collection”, while POLIN “recalls and preserves the past”. The NDG bases its exhibitions on art heritage, whereas POLIN focuses on immaterial heritage, offering visitors a constructed narrative.

The main difference is in who gets to create meaning in the museum: while POLIN offers a recalling of the past, the NDG invites the visitor to join in the interpretation of the past, and offers the tools to do so. However, as POLIN presents a narrative, it necessarily offers an interpretation of the past.

Moreover, in its mission statement POLIN localises the Jewish community in Poland, which the NDG does not, as it is not primarily concerned with expanding what it means to be ‘Lithuanian’. Rather than incorporating the Jewish community into the Lithuanian ‘core group’, the museum aims to position Lithuania in a global context.

POLIN further declares its vision: “to create a modern museum – an educational and cultural centre, a platform for social dialogue, an institution oﬀering a profound, transformative experience

24 and promoting new standards of relating to history.” (Mission and Vision) The claim to create a modern museum is problematic: modernity as a concept of the linear progression of civilisations is racially charged and has fuelled colonialism, and in a universalist deﬁnition of the Holocaust can be seen as the enabler of the genocide. Thus the use of ‘modern’ as an adjective rather than a category

(modern art implies a category of art) can be seen as self-colonisation, the prevention of which is one of the main reasons for the localisation of Holocaust memory: Wawrzyniak and Pakier argued that there is a need for a new way of representing the Holocaust in Eastern Europe – one that does more than adapt the vocabulary and conclusions of Holocaust studies as carried out in the West (2013).

By describing the museum as modern, rather than implying that the museum is contemporary, it says it is stuck in a certain period and way of thinking that has already been critiqued extensively.

POLIN continues its vision by naming itself an educational institution, and for the ﬁrst time mentions reciprocal communication as part of the museum’s goals. It then uses the word ‘experience’ in relation to transformation: as Lowenthal said, one comes to the museum to become something

(1998), and in the case of POLIN, to become a Polish national relating to the history of Polish Jews as to their own history. Thus the museum asserts that through an experience of a narrative claimed to be authentic the visitor will be transformed, following the ideas of Pine and Gilmore (2007). Even though there is a mention of dialogue, POLIN aims to change its visitors through experience, rather than allowing them to join in the creation of meaning through their reﬂection.

The NDG’s vision is focused on communication with its visitors: “NDG is a contemporaneous, multifunctional centre for art and culture, seeking a dialogue with society. This is a space for active communication, where the audience can see the permanent and temporary exhibitions as well as participate in cultural events, lectures and educational programmes.” (Visitor

Information) In place of ‘modern’ it uses the word ‘contemporaneous’, with completely diﬀerent connotations, meaning simply ‘of the current time’. The museum mentions the services it provides: exhibitions, a permanent collection and a programme of events. This shows that it is constantly changing, and, since it claims to seek a dialogue with society, one can assume that it is changing with the input from its visitors. The museum aims to create a reciprocal relationship with its audiences, and, rather than transforming the visitor through ‘experience’, it seeks participation and

25 communication, which demands action and intent not only on the part of the museum but also from the audience. I would argue this is moving away from Pine and Gilmore’s concept of experience

(2007) to Belting’s idea of creating a space for reﬂection (2001). A museum should include its visitors in the creation of meaning rather than giving them an experience through rendered authenticity. From their mission statements, the NDG appears to be doing the former and POLIN the latter.

Research Question and Methodology

POLIN and NDG, as national museums face a similar challenge when exhibiting works on such difficult topics like the Holocaust. Although not a straightforward comparison, as national museums in a globalising world they both face difficult decisions in presenting their narrative and representing difficult themes like the Holocaust. The choices between experience and dialogue, artefacts and multimedia, influence the exhibitions and the processes of making them. The museums’ ‘missions and visions’ show the context in which the exhibitions are constructed and must be taken into account to understand their content and form. As POLIN and NDG have different positions on what they are trying to achieve as a museum, a comparison of how they represent the Holocaust is informative to understand how different museological strategies enable representation and meaning making. In this thesis, I investigate how POLIN and NDG represent the Holocaust in the context of the debate on the impossibility of representing the Holocaust. As NDG’s exhibition Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond “represent” the Holocaust through contemporary art, rather than in a historical museum setting like POLIN, I inquire what strategies that offers for the representation of the Holocaust in

Eastern Europe, where the “never again” narrative competes with national historical narratives of victimhood. As an alternative to “representation”, I argue that through contemporary art the

Holocaust is presence(d), as an artwork is never just a representation of something and the physical presence of the audience and the artwork is required for the meaning to be created and understood.

A contemporary artwork on Holocaust thus is not a representation of it, but a possibility to generate an understanding of it in the present, connecting to the visitors own experience.

The research was carried out by participant observation of the exhibitions and a spatial analysis. In my visits to both museums I have carefully analysed the exhibitions, before carrying out interviews with the curators, so I could have the experience of a regular visitor. Afterwards, interviews

26 with curators Kamila Radecka-Mikulicz from POLIN and Vytenis Burokas and Eglė Mikalajūnė from

NDG were done, either in person or via “Skype”. After the interviews the exhibitions were analysed again, with a separate screening of Kader Attia’s Reﬂecting Memory. Moreover, as one of the original interviewee Joanna Fikus from POLIN was unable to attend the interview I asked follow up questions over email. The transcripts of the interviews and email can be found in the Appendix in their original language. The ﬁndings from the observations of the exhibitions and the museums themselves and the interviews were then combined in an analysis of the exhibitions, based on the theory of representation of the Holocaust and its representation within artworks. The analysis was based on academic literature from memory and trauma studies and contextualised by journalistic publications as well as private tours in mass shooting locations in Lithuania, namely Paneriai and XI Fortas, to give an overview of the political climate in which the exhibitions are created and in which the

Holocaust is represented. The findings are a synthesis of the visual and textual information and gives an insight into what different museological strategies can offer in representation of difficult subjects, and how contemporary art can overcome most of the impossibilities of representing the Holocaust.

In the ﬁrst chapter I will outline how POLIN represents and localises the Holocaust in its Core

Exhibition and Holocaust, and examine the tools it uses, which are mainly testimony and spatial experience. In the second chapter I will introduce concepts of presence as an alternative to the representation of the Holocaust, which can be done through contemporary art, as well as temporal localisation, which, rather than just contextualising the Holocaust in the broader history of the place, also connects it to other cultural traumas internationally. I will use these terms to investigate how, by including Kader Attia’s Reﬂecting Memory, Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond created a multidirectional

‘representation’ of the Holocaust. In the third chapter I will compare the representations created in the different exhibitions, identifying the alternative possibilities that a representation in an art space brings to the depiction of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe in comparison to historical museums. In the conclusion I will show what the capacity to represent the Holocaust can tell us about different museological strategies. The discussion of the Holocaust remains difficult, and in my research I attempt to see how museums can be a place for this discussion. I look at how unexpected museums

27 – museums of art – can bring alternative, and maybe more productive, ways to talk about these issues and thus broaden who belongs to the ‘core nation’.

28 Chapter 1. The Holocaust in the Core Exhibition in POLIN

The impossibility of representing the Holocaust has been discussed almost since the event itself.

Theodor Adorno31 addressed it in 1949, where he asked how we can continue creating under the same conditions that made the Holocaust possible. Many scholars have considered the diﬃculties.

Ernst Van Alphen32 identiﬁed a lack of adequate language to represent it, as the word ‘hungry’ as we use it in everyday life cannot convey the feeling of ‘hunger’ in concentration camps (1997). In If this is a man Primo Levi talked about the survivors’ loss of agency, as they had had to trample their own humanity in order to survive: the people imprisoned in concentration camps every day witnessed others being violently mistreated, but standing up for them meant certain death (1986). Survival in a concentration camp thus meant turning a blind eye to other human suﬀering, which Levi interprets as a surrendering of agency and thus humanity (ibid.). This implies that the only actual witnesses of the

Holocaust were the ones who perished in it, as the ones that survived surrendered their capacity to witness the horriﬁc events as they gave up their agency. Jean-François Lyotard was afraid that the memorialisation of the Holocaust would cause the trauma to be forgotten, since the memorial would do the memory work that should be done by the people in order to ‘never forget’ (1990).

Notwithstanding these diﬃculties, scholars have continued the inquiry into how to represent the

Holocaust, and many museums and monuments have been created to represent it. There have been two main approaches to studying and explaining the Holocaust, which A. D. Moses33 identifies as ideological-intentionalist and structural-functionalist. They give different reasons for the Holocaust and therefore have different views as to what should be analysed and presented in trying to understand it. In both approaches testimony plays a role in the presentation of the Holocaust, whether from the perspective of the victim or the perpetrator. To work around the impossibility of representing the Holocaust (and bridge the two approaches) museums, monuments and even artworks have employed several visual tropes: indexicality and the portrayal of absence. Any

Holocaust exhibition must choose how to present it, in content and form, and many use a

31 In What does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean? (1949)

32 In Caught by history: Holocaust eﬀects in contemporary art, literature, and theory (1997)

33In Structure and Agency in the Holocaust: Daniel J. Goldhagen and His Critics (1998)

29 combination of ideological-intentionalist and structural-functionalist approaches, testimony and visual tools that attempt to overcome the impossibility of representation.

The POLIN museum of the history of Polish Jews presents the Holocaust in its Core

Exhibition of the past, present and future of the rich and long presence of Jews in Poland. A diﬃcult subject to represent in any context, it is particularly fraught in Eastern Europe, which experienced the double trauma of the Communist and Nazi regimes. The museum attempts to localise the memory of the Holocaust, thus incorporating it into the national narrative. In this chapter I will analyse POLIN’s

Holocaust gallery in the context of their Core Exhibition. I will ﬁrst present various theoretical and visual approaches to the representation of the Holocaust and move on to an inquiry into how the museum adopts these approaches and how it tackles the central issue in the representation of the

Holocaust in Eastern Europe as established in the introduction to this thesis: the lack of localisation.

Particularist and Universalist Holocaust Representation Through Testimony and Absence

The ideological-intentionalist, or ‘particularist’, approach to the Holocaust sees it as a unique and incomparable crime carried out speciﬁcally against Jews by Germans, as a consequence of the anti-

Semitism within Nazi ideology (Moses, 1998). From this perspective the victim and perpetrator are clear and human agency is seen as the propelling reason for the genocide. The Jews are considered the main victims, and the event is caused by a specific pathology in the German nation. Due to the importance attributed to ideology in this approach, the content of the Nazi propaganda is seen to be the cause of the genocide of the European Jewish population. However, this approach could be said to exclude the most important reason to remember the Holocaust, or at least what has brought it to be considered the most horrific catastrophe of modern Western history: that rather than being a product of German pathology it occurred in a ‘modern’ and ‘advanced’ civilisation (ibid.). The structural-functionalist approach to the Holocaust is universalist, saying that it was a product of modernity rather than something specifically German (or Jewish). The mass-murder of Jews is perceived as a result of bureaucratic rather than ideological intent: it was made possible by people who were listening to orders and wanted to excel in their tasks, which Hannah Arendt34 identifies as banal evil. The bureaucratic apparatus that was employed to carry out the Holocaust is seen as its

34 In Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1977)

30 cause, meaning it could happen in any modern society. By framing the Holocaust as the ultimate failure of modernity the universalist approach takes agency from the perpetrators, adding that the

Holocaust can only be understood through the perpetrators actions as part of the bureaucratic apparatus (Moses, 1998: 203). This abandons the victim’s perspective and moves away from the moral standpoint posited by ideological-intentionalists. The universalist proposition disregards intent and treats the Final Solution as an accident that came about rather than an intentional decision based on anti-Semitic ideology. Thus, through their separate focus on content and form, and on human agency and bureaucracy, each approach overlooks important aspects of the Holocaust, meaning that a combination of the two is required for a complete representation. Nonetheless,

Holocaust museums are still obliged to decide which approach to emphasise depending on their mission.

In both the universalist and particularist approaches to the Holocaust testimony is important, whether of perpetrators, as in the famous Eichmann trial for the former, or victims’ accounts for the latter. Shoshana Felman35 explains that, beyond recounting events, testimony is bearing witness by taking responsibility for truth (1992). By testifying one recalls a memory to address someone or a community: “to testify is thus not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to commit the narrative, to others: to take responsibility – in speech – for history or for the truth of an occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes beyond the personal, in having general (nonpersonal) validity and consequences” (ibid.: 103). However, despite the essence of testimony being impersonal, the witness’s speech is irreplaceable. According to Hannah Pollin-Galay36 in the semiotic tradition only through human observation and mediation is the full meaning of phenomena created, involving the testifier and the community that is being addressed (2016: 508). In order to be understood by others each witness tells their story by drawing on the context of their experience of their environment, and so they can illuminate the past. This understanding of testimony allows recognition of the horror of specific events while treating the interpretation of the event in the testimony with equal importance (Pollin-Galay, 2016: 508).

35 In The Betrayal Of The Witness: Camus The Fall (1992)

36 In ‘Naming the Criminal: Lithuanian Jews Remember Perpetrators' (2016)

31 An example of how diﬀerent communities mediate similar events is in Pollin-Galay’s comparative study of Lithuanian Holocaust survivors. Dori Laub37 says Holocaust survivors do not use ‘I’ for themselves as victims or ‘you’ for the perpetrators when talking about their experiences, because the reality of the Holocaust made it impossible to appeal to each other as humans. This can be seen as a continuation of Levi’s claim that the survivors had to lose their agency and humanity in order to survive and correlates with the structural-functionalist approach by eliminating the possibility of agency (1986). It can be heard in the testimonies of Holocaust survivors who relocated to Israel after the war and spoke in Hebrew, as they recalled their stories as a shared experience between the

Jewish community as victims in a monumental mode of remembering: “talking about the perpetrator means talking about the Jewish body politic and its response to victimization” (Pollin-Galay, 2016:

508) However, the Jews who stayed in Lithuania after the war and spoke in Yiddish had a much more forensic tone, with a clear victim (I) and perpetrator (you), the latter often being identified by name,38 implying stable identities despite the violence witnessed. Each of these approaches has its downfalls: “in monumentalising, one intrudes on the recollection of powerlessness with a promise of progress and obscures the human act of wrong. In the forensic mode, one keeps sight of contingency and individual culpability, but threatens the dignity of the witness by introducing doubt and suspending final judgment” (Pollin-Galay, 2016: 526). However, one can be seen as a claim for community and the other for division, demonstrating the specifics of testimony in the context of the

Holocaust in countries like Lithuania and Poland, where forensic testimonies by victims of the

Holocaust and the Soviet regime are competing with each other.

Representation of the Holocaust in museums and exhibitions cannot only rely on text and language, as our language is incapable of conveying the horrors people experienced, as argued by

Alphen (1997), and there is no true witness to the Holocaust, as Felman claims in her analysis of

Camus’s The Fall: “in bearing witness to the witness’s inability to witness – to the narrating subject’s inability to cross the bridge towards the Other’s death or life – The Fall inscribes the Holocaust as the impossible historical narrative of an event without a witness, an event eliminating its own

37 In An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival (1992)

38 German perpetrators mostly remained nameless as they were not known. In most cases only Lithuanian perpetrators were named, as they were known to the victims – often their neighbours – and because bullets were a much more personal means of killing than concentration camps (Pollin-Galay, 2016: 508).

32 witness” (Felman, 1992: 200). Tactics have been employed to convey the Holocaust visually, the most often used in trauma museums being indexicality. In ‘Trauma Site Museums and Politics of

Memory' Patrizia Violi explains that erecting memorial museums where the trauma occurred maintains spatial contiguity with what is being commemorated and activates a direct link to the past

(2012: 39). This can also be achieved through objects, such as Holocaust victims’ belongings, as they point to the absence of their owner. As mentioned above, according to Levi, the real witnesses of the Holocaust are all dead, since the survivors had to “kill” their humanity in order to survive

(1986). So when visitors look at an object, such as a victim’s shoes, they think of the person who died – a true witness of the Holocaust. Another visual tool is the portrayal of silence and absence.

Silence in this case is not the lack of speech but a positive silence, implying that it is an act in itself

(Felman, 1992). The visualisation of absence is commonly used to represent the Holocaust in museums and memorials. Rather than didactically telling the visitor what must be remembered, the portrayal of absence, which can be realised by creating negative space in earth for a monument or in the walls and ﬂoors of a museum (termed ‘counter-monuments’ in James E. Young’s The Counter-

Monument: Memory Against Itself In Germany Today [1992]), visitors are asked to do the memory work and create the meaning of the void themselves. Despite the Holocaust being extremely difficult, if not impossible, to represent, there have been many attempts to do so, and certain tropes have developed. The different views of the causes of the Holocaust greatly influence the form of representation that is chosen, especially in the case of testimony. With their conceptions of the

Holocaust diﬀering from those in the West, representations in Poland and Lithuania face even more challenges.

Part of our History, Part of Us: The Localisation of Polish Jews

The ﬁrst chapter of the Core Exhibition, Forest, unfolds like an art installation: descending down the stairs from the main hall visitors are faced with large glass panels on which a lively forest is projected

(Appendix 1), together with excerpts from the legend of how Jews settled in Poland 1000 years ago.

It says they were told by God to rest there when they came to the forests, and so they did. Behind the glass panels stands a large mirror, in which visitors can see themselves and identify with the

Jews’ search for a home in the Middle Ages. The physical elements, such as the stairs, create a

33 spatial experience, as the visitors descend into a ‘valley’ as the Jews had done. The grand space creates a majestic feeling, while the subdued lighting compared to the entrance hall from which visitors enter adds mystery. The architectural and design choices – the mirror, stairs and mimicking of the forest – all aim to recreate the Jewish experience, so that visitors ‘become’ or at least feel something like the first Jews who came to Poland. The fictional narrative provides a fairytale-like opening to the museum. In claiming a ‘godly’ right for Jews to settle in Poland, it implies that, although they might not be part of the ‘core nation’, they are part of Poland as they also have a mythical claim to the land. Aside from the ending of the core exhibition, this is the most artistic presentation of information, as it uses multimedia to convey a feeling. As the topic presented is a myth rather than factual information, this kind of presentation seems almost self-evident, and allows space for the visitor to decide whether to believe it or not. Since myths are important to the creation of nationhood, the narrative is no less powerful for possibly being fictional. Rather, it claims that

Poland’s Jewish community is part of the greater nationhood myth, with its own connection to the land where Poland is situated and its own rights as the ‘core nation’. The introduction to the Core

Exhibition thus immerses the visitor into the narrative while introducing the main argument of the museum and the permanent exhibition: the localisation of Jews in Poland.

The following three chapters, First Encounters (960–1500), Paradisus Iudaeorum (1569–1648) and The Jewish Town (1648-1772), depict the life of the Jewish population in the kingdom of Poland and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The rooms are filled with quotes from books of the time, including a prayer book containing the first complete sentence written in Yiddish in 1272. The establishment of a new Jewish language in Poland showed that life for Jewish settlers was easier here than in Western Europe in regards to rights and persecution, as the local rulers saw the settlers as a way to modernise the economy. The Jewish community played a role in developing the currency in Poland, fulfilling the expectations of the rulers and establishing the community in the country. The main artefacts in the exhibition are coins, showing the importance of participating in the creation of wealth within Poland. Paradisus Iudaeorum (Jewish Paradise) is presented as the golden age in the history of Polish Jews, and it starts with the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Unlike anywhere else in Europe, the Jewish community there had their own self-government and were

34 invited to settle on noble estates. The centrepiece of the exhibition is an interactive diorama of

Krakow and Kazimierz, showing the rich culture of the Jewish community in the royal city. Near the diorama visitors can browse a digital library of religious, philosophical and traditional works written at the time. This chapter shows the rich contribution of the Jewish community to the cultural life of the commonwealth, as well as how the area became a centre for Jewish cultural and religious life, mainly due to the lack of religious persecution which was common in other parts of Europe.39 The Jewish

Town starts with the Chmielnicki uprising, which was especially bloody for the Jewish community. It was a very turbulent time for all inhabitants of the Commonwealth, but the gallery focuses on the daily life of the Jewish community, which revolved around the synagogue and marketplace. Both of these are recreated in the gallery, along with a tavern, dwelling and church, showing the daily life and interactions of the Jewish community, between themselves and with their Polish neighbours. The synagogue is central to this display: it is a recreation of the painted ceiling of a synagogue in

Gwoździec. Each of the three chapters aims to present the Jewish presence in Poland in the Middle

Ages as having been very beneﬁcial to the development of the country, and also as a centre for

Jewish culture itself, thriving while it was impossible to do so in other parts of Europe. The constant comparison aims to portray the uniqueness of the Jewish case in Poland, and that it was mutually beneﬁcial. Highlighting the Jews’ cultural and economic contribution to the development of Poland shows that what we now consider as Poland has been shaped throughout the ages by the Jewish community, thus again localising Jews in the narrative of Polish history. This is reinforced by an emphasis on the uniqueness and richness of Jewish life in Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, in contrast to Western Europe at the time.

Encounters with Modernity (1772–1914) and On the Jewish Street (1918–1939) begin with the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and end with the outbreak of World War II.

Encounters with Modernity addresses the questions raised around the integration of Jews into mainstream society while maintaining their distinctiveness. The gallery is divided into several parts, with the ﬁrst focusing on Russia, Austria and Prussia partitioning the First Republic and the fate of

Jews in each. It then looks at industrialisation and how it changed daily Jewish life, especially the

39 Religious persecution existed and is talked about in the exhibition, but it is stressed that it was not as common as in other parts of Europe and was not institutionalised.

35 clothing. The physical changes are followed by the division of thought within the Jewish community: the growing national awareness manifested in modern political movements, such as Bundism,

Zionism and Agudas Israel. This chapter, which ends with recreations of schools for rabbis and the great thinkers, emphasises the multiplicity of cultural thought within the Jewish community at the time and how the geographical area of Poland was a centre for these discussions, as many great thinkers resided and set up their schools there. On the Jewish Street starts with the First World War before looking at the Polish independence that followed. This chapter is called the second Golden

Age of Jews in Poland, due to the wealth of Jewish life, but the museum also acknowledges the growing anti-Semitism that resulted in mass emigration from the country. The chapter is structured around a replica of Zamenhof Street, which was in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. Topics of importance are projected onto the walls (Appendix 1). From the street the visitor can enter diﬀerent

‘buildings’, in which the realities of daily life are recounted, including cultural production, such as print and ﬁlm, and the growing divide between the Zionist movement and the increasingly assimilated Jews, many of whom attended non-Jewish schools. Encounters with Modernity and On the Jewish Street recount the changing life of the Jewish community in Poland, both physically and culturally. As in the previous chapters, the museum aims to show Poland as a Jewish cultural hub, and it is even more pronounced here – the space devoted to Jewish political thought being the main indicator of that – and the portrayal of the print and media highlight the Jewish contribution to Polish cultural life. One section of On the Jewish Street is dedicated to Vilna40 as the ‘Jerusalem of the

East’, exemplifying the main message of the galleries: that Poland has been a cultural hub for the

Jewish community, implying both that the Jewish community is part of Poland and that Poland has welcomed the Jewish community throughout the years.

The seventh chapter of the Core Exhibition is Holocaust (1939-1945), made by a diverse team of curators and historians, led by professors Barbara Engelking41 and Jacek Leociak.42 As stated in the ﬁrst chapter, the museum’s creators had not set out to make another Holocaust museum but to dedicate theirs to the living. Therefore the Holocaust is only one chapter, and, most

40 In the exhibition it is called Vilna, as it was called when it was part of Poland in the interwar period, but now it is in Lithuania and called Vilnius.

41 Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

42 Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences

36 importantly, just another one in the rich 1000-year history of Jews in Poland, rather than the point to which the previous chapters were leading (Radecka-Mikulicz and Mockutė). However, a key message is that the Holocaust happened on Polish soil, with the Jews’ compatriots as bystanders, perpetrators and saviours of Jews (ibid.). This follows the museum’s narrative of the history of Jews in Poland as part of Polish history, both the good and bad times, thereby localising the Holocaust as part of both Jewish history in Poland and Polish history in general. This could be seen as an ideological-intentionalist approach to the Holocaust, as there is a focus on the particularity. However, it does not focus as much on Germany, and, in the ﬁrst two parts of the exhibition, it recounts experiences from a domestic rather than ideological position. Nevertheless, the emphasis is on the victims’ experience and agency, and the identities of those involved shows a more particularist representation of the Holocaust.

Localising the Holocaust in Poland begs the question as to why it was mainly carried out there, and the museum ﬁnds it important to explain the reasons, which it gives as Poland having had

Europe’s largest Jewish diaspora, making it the most convenient place to set up concentration camps. Moreover, Polish society was suppressed by terror, having been the first country to be occupied by Germany from the west, in a matter of days, and the USSR from the east. The harsh oppression suffered by all meant there was no chance of large-scale protest and it was difficult for news of what was happening to leave the country. The museum’s Holocaust chapter uses various visual tools along with a cacophony of voices giving testimony. The gallery is arranged chronothematically (Radecka-Mikulicz and Mockutė), mixing chronological and thematic presentation to show the different perspectives people had of the events at the time. The chronothematic narrative presentation divides the gallery into three parts, each of which gives the perspective of an agent in the Holocaust: Poland’s Jewish population, its non-Jewish population and the occupying German forces, and each is told chronologically (although from different starting points). The format was chosen as the clearest possible way to present a difficult subject without losing the visitor in the different narrative strands (Radecka-Mikulicz and Mockutė). If it had been strictly chronological, the narrative would have become too subdivided into the different versions of the history experienced by different groups. The gallery’s three parts do not have clear indications of

37 start and end, and interaction between them is possible, as with the example of a bridge discussed later on. The divisions are kept unclear to reflect the uncertainty of the time and that, even though there were distinct groups in the war, their responsibilities and actions are not so easily categorised; this is reflected in the polyphonic voices with first-hand accounts throughout the exhibition. Dividing the exhibition into groups of people shows that the museum wants the individual to be central to the

Holocaust story and this is reinforced by the use of testimony as the main textual information. It is an approach that particularises the experience of the Holocaust, acknowledging each person’s diﬀerent experience and allowing the victim to be identiﬁed. However, it also reinforces the division between the ‘core group’ of ethnic Poles and the Jewish minority.

The exhibition shows visitors how varied the experiences and options were within each group. The ﬁrst of the three parts focuses mainly on personal testimony, presenting the structure that enabled the Holocaust to be carried out only at the end, then introducing a universalist approach. A powerful example of the plurality of individual voices are the reactions to the suicide of a Judenrat leader, as the diﬀerent quotes show that the ghetto population was not united in their perception of

Adam Czerniaków taking his own life. The second part has the voices of non-Jewish bystanders, protectors and perpetrators, and explicitly states that most were bystanders. The explanation given is that they were also under German terror and therefore ignorant of how cruelly Jews were being treated in the ghettos and later on in the camps. The diﬀerent actions that were chosen are presented in both personal testimonies and structural graphs, mainly used in the presentation of the organised resistance. The last part of the exhibition focuses on the structure of the Holocaust, starting when Jews ﬁrst discovered that the Germans were carrying out mass killings. The German voice can be heard through the images that are exhibited in the museum, as it was mostly they who documented events with cameras. However, the exhibition also chooses to humanise them by displaying postcards that the Einsatzgruppen soldiers sent back to their families. The combination of the universalist and particularist narratives is especially clear in the presentation of concentration camps: on one side the display is on Auschwitz-Birkenau, told through a structural perspective, and on the other Treblinka, recounted through Jewish voices and personal testimonies. The humanising

38 of all involved illustrates that the Holocaust was carried out by people and suﬀered by people, asking visitors to reﬂect on their own humanity and values.

The ﬁnal chapter is Postwar Years (1944 to present) is important in the representation of the

Holocaust as it still references it and provides the context necessary to localise the Holocaust in

Poland. It begins with a hall tiled with registration cards, most left blank to illustrate the loss of

Jewish life through the war. The next few rooms show a world in ruins, with blocks of rubble in the room. The history of the making of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes is also recounted here. The gallery continues with the portrayal of Jewish life in Communist Poland, with a room dedicated to the activities of the Socio-Cultural Association of Jews in Poland. It covers the anti-Semitic campaign during the political crisis of March 1968, focusing on the mechanisms and causes of the growing prejudice that resulted in mass emigration, with the state issuing one-way visas to Jews. After 1989, with Poland independent of the communist bloc, Jewish culture became important again for the general public in Poland, presented here with art projects and publications that deal with the subject.

The place of Jewish culture in contemporary Poland is further discussed in the last gallery of the

Core Exhibition, which consists of multimedia screens, where visitors can watch and listen to people talking about memory and identity in contemporary Polish Jewish life. Recounting the life of Jews in

Poland after the Holocaust, this gallery is one of the most criticised parts of the exhibition by locals, due to the unﬂattering portrayal of the events of 1968. The chapter aims to show that Poland’s

Jewish community did not disappear despite the dramatic reduction in its size. The last section, dedicated to independent Poland, expresses hope through various art projects dealing with the issue, from paintings to photographs, and suggests that the museum sees the future of the discussion of Jewish life in Poland in artistic expression. The last installation, consisting of videos of people discussing the museum’s key topic, the history of Jewish life in Poland and its place in contemporary Poland, can be seen as an art installation itself, mimicking the ﬁrst chapter’s design with light blocks, and, rather than claiming knowledge, engaging viewers in a discussion of the topics addressed throughout the museum (Appendix 1). This chapter provides context as to how the

Holocaust was interpreted within communist Poland and the progress that has been made since. It highlights Poland’s double trauma and shows how the memory work, although attempted with the

39 building of the memorial, was frozen in time during the communist regime, with the events of 1968 continuing the erasure of Jewish life from the country. Nonetheless, Jewish life in democratic Poland is presented positively, and underlines that memory work and collaboration are the key to reworking the double trauma.

As outlined in the introduction, the diﬃculties associated with discussion of the Holocaust in

Eastern Europe have made its representation problematic. Although not exclusively dedicated to the

Holocaust, POLIN attempts to localise it within the Polish context, as suggested by Wawrzyniak and

Pakier (2013). The museum presents the Holocaust as part of the thousand-year narrative of Jewish life in Poland, thereby addressing the context of the Jewish tragedy, including the double trauma of occupation and communism. The positioning of the post-war chapter shows that there was a gap in the memory work in Poland, and that all its citizens suffered through both the regimes without being able to deal with them until the demise of the USSR. The narrative was mainly created within Poland, with the help of foreign scholars. The first two parts of Holocaust focus on the citizens’ individual experiences of the Holocaust in Poland. It then addresses the Eastern Europe context, with a display of the ‘Holocaust by bullets’. Most importantly, it addresses the state’s ‘nationalising nationalism’ by showing how the Jewish community was always part of Poland, although not necessarily included in the ‘core nation’, and has the same right to the Polish identity, to be memorialised, and for its suffering to be remembered. This is demonstrated by POLIN’s stated mission to be a museum of the living.

The chronothematic arrangement in the Holocaust gallery attempts to combine the universalist and particularist perspectives on the Holocaust – to tell the personal stories of the Jews who experienced it while showing it as a human tragedy that could happen in any modern society.

By emphasising the experiences and involvement of Jews and non-Jews the museum aims to show that the memorialising of their suffering need not evolve in mutual competition. The universalist narrative of the Holocaust is failing in Eastern European states, as is shown by the Polish bill claiming that the only perpetrators of the Holocaust were the Third Reich. This leaves the question as to whether a particularist view and a focus on common suffering that does not point at the perpetrators manages to convey the message of ‘never again’, in terms of the inflicting of such

40 torment. The inability to communicate a more universalist narrative could be attributed to the focus on the past, with most of the Holocaust gallery using only testimonies from the time in order to place the visitor in the events and obscure the fact that this is a representation of the Holocaust created in the present time to be understood by people in the present.

However, in combination with the rest of the exhibition, the Holocaust gallery accomplishes what could be said to be the museum’s main goal: to localise the Holocaust. Through incorporating the events in the general framework of Jewish life in Poland it aims to show the Jewish community as part of the national community of Poland. Although relying so much on testimony could be seen as problematic, by bringing the plurality of voices together and emphasising the voices of Polish

Jews and non-Jews rather than Germans it shows that the Holocaust happened in Poland, among

Poles. Moreover, it explains the speciﬁc Polish experience, both with the presentation of the

‘Holocaust by Bullets’ and the concentration camps. Although the Holocaust gallery exclusively focuses on the past, the following chapter, The Postwar Years, invites visitors to reﬂect on the

Holocaust in the present through artworks made since Poland became a democratic nation state, showing the double trauma and how it was impossible to have an open dialogue on the Holocaust during the communist regime. Thus, although perhaps not ‘successfully’ represented, POLIN manages to localise the Holocaust, overcoming what Wawrzyniak and Pakier identify as the main issue of incorporating the Holocaust in Eastern European national narratives (2013).

Testimony in the Core Exhibition

POLIN’s Core Exhibition aims to show the richness and diversity of Jewish life in Poland through the nation’s history. It aims to celebrate bright chapters while also providing an in-depth look at the difficult times. The presentation allows the narrative to be told in the first person, with most of the information provided by excerpts from first-hand accounts of the period. The texts are shown first in the language that they were written, whether Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew or any other, followed by translations into Polish and English (although audio guides are available in more languages). There are also longer quotations by scholars and curators, and the ‘museum voice’, presented as impartial, objective information without an author. However, the prevalence of the quotes in their multiplicity of unmediated voices shows that POLIN wants to create an authentic experience of the period. This

41 could be explained by the lack of artefacts, making indexicality impossible in the storytelling, and thus justifying the use of testimony throughout the Core Exhibition as immaterial heritage. This approach enables an ‘authentic experience’ but also eliminates the visibility of the museum’s mediation, which can be seen as doing the memory work for the audience.

The use of quotes and juxtapositions of different schools of thought creates a polemical narrative of the history. However, the cacophony of voices sometimes feels overpowering, as in every gallery there is too much information for the average visitor to read. Each chapter take two hours to look at closely, making it impossible to see it all in one day. The museum’s proposed solution is the audio guide, which takes the visitor through the museum in two hours, highlighting the most important parts. According to Radecka-Mikulicz, the idea is that after lunch the visitor would come back and look at the parts they found most interesting. The idea of POLIN as a narrative museum was worked on for twenty years before its realisation; thus, although innovative at the time, it now compares easily to many such museums: an overflow of information that makes the visitor give up before even starting to engage with the exhibition. However, due to the nuances and different versions of difficult issues like trauma, there is no simple solution to reduce the amount of written information presented in the museum.

The primary sources in the Holocaust gallery, mainly ﬁrst-person testimonies in the original language, give the narrative in chronological order. They reﬂect the knowledge people had then, so use of the terms ‘Shoah’, ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Death Camps” only start to be used when the people became aware of them: when an escaped prisoner reported it to those in the Warsaw ghetto, which is where the third part of the exhibition starts. Visitors are asked to suspend their disbelief and relate to the perception of events at the time (Radecka-Mikulicz and Mockutė). This again emphasises the personal dimension of the Holocaust and an understanding of the decisions that people were forced to make with the information available. For example, since no one knew the ghettoisation of Jews would lead to mass extermination they did little to resist. People now ask why, as they were being lead to their deaths, particularly by shooting, did no one try to resist, the answer being that they hoped they might survive by being orderly. The way the exhibition uses their perspective removes the victims’ and survivors’ agency and renders a feeling of authenticity. The choice of written

42 testimony also had practical reasons, as most of the voices in the museum are Jewish, and during the Holocaust Jews rarely had any other means of documentation but writing down their experience.

The quotes can still be considered testimony, as most were intended to be conveyed to an audience and remembered. Given that the many quotes ranging from the forensic to the monumental, were mostly written during the Holocaust, they remain individual experiences and do not provide a framework as to how it was perceived and mediated by common understanding through the act of testimony, as suggested by Felman (1992). Nonetheless, the museum could be seen to have undertaken this mediation in bringing the testimonies together, so that it is mainly43 monumental as it creates an idea of a shared experience between all groups. With almost no objects, testimony, as the referential word, provides the exhibition’s narrative with authenticity, particularly in the plurality of experiences. The museum’s choice of testimonies of the time aimed to create an authentic experience of what it was like to be a victim, perpetrator or bystander. However, the collation of testimony renders the museum’s mediation invisible and claims to be an accurate (unmediated) depiction of the Holocaust. As I have explained, language cannot represent the Holocaust, since the agency of the witnesses is compromised and words are inadequate. Thus, even though authenticity is achieved through the use of quotes rather than the museum’s voice, it ignores the fact that the exhibition exists in the present, which removes from the victims the agency of retelling their story and gives it to the museum to tell its version.

The Holocaust gallery’s overwhelming dependency on testimony therefore has the advantages of creating a feeling of authenticity and bringing a human dimension. Yet, many critiques on Holocaust representation say language is inadequate. For example, Alphen claims that words cannot describe the experience (1997) and Levi says that the agency of survivors has been taken away and only the dead victims could truly bear witness (1986). This view would invalidate POLIN’s representation, as most of it is created through textual ‘heritage’. The museum could be more successful if it pointed to these shortcomings and to the mediation it performs by using the testimonies, rather than oﬀering them as the truth without inviting the visitor to create meaning.

43 The division of the ﬁrst two chapters is more particularist, as it divides the groups into two separate identities: ‘Jews’ and ‘Poles’, but the diﬀering roles of the latter blurs the boundaries again.

43 POLIN neglects the fact that the exhibition is experienced in the present and fails to represent the

Holocaust, by not acknowledging its mediation or allowing the visitor to do it themselves.

Spatial Experience and Authenticity in the Holocaust Gallery

Testimony is not the only way trauma is presented in Holocaust. As in the example of the Forest, the museum has many design and architectural solutions to create what I identify as spatial experience.

The galleries were designed by Event Communications of London (Radecka-Mikulicz and Mockutė), whose manager has a background in opera and theatre sets, which Radecka-Mikulicz said translated well for the emotion in the museum. Throughout the gallery the architecture aims to give visitors the feeling of being there at the time. It employs visual cues common to Holocaust museums, such as the portrayal of absence and the use of materials such as concrete and rusty metal. The combination of written testimony and the spatial experience aims to give visitors an authentic experience of Jewish life in Poland at the time.

The ﬁrst part of this gallery’s chronothematic arrangement begins with the outbreak of World

War II and ends with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It focuses exclusively on the Jewish experience, particularly the history of the ghetto, as the museum is built on its site. The chapter on the Holocaust is located directly opposite the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes outside the museum, clearly referencing the spatial contiguity of the space with the event. The exhibition starts with a narration of the German invasion of Poland, before describing the treatment of Jews after the occupation: excluded from the rest of the community, humiliated publicly and later forced into ghettos.

Information is presented on panels, against a background of blurry, hand-drawn contours of ﬁgures

(Appendix 1). The curators chose to show the clear images of the ﬁgures only on the back of the panels, where they are presented in their original size, in order not to repeat the humiliation caused to the victims when the photos were taken (Radecka-Mikulicz and Mockutė). They felt that the ﬁrst violent act was the humiliation and the second was taking the pictures; blowing them up would be to re-enact the trauma. As the pictures were taken by perpetrators this could be seen as a subjective view of the humiliations, taking agency from the victims. But showing them in their original size and as a footnote to the main presentation turns them into artefacts, with the story of how they were made and came to the museum being as important in the presentation as what they portray.

44 Moreover, there is a clear attempt not to deny the victims their agency in presenting their testimonies as the most important document, with the perpetrators’ photographs as artefacts only conﬁrming their suﬀering.

The story of the Warsaw ghetto starts in the next hall. The space is divided by diagonal walls that seem to close in on the visitor (Appendix 1). As in Holocaust exhibitions elsewhere, the use of grey concrete attempts to convey the brutality of the time. Compared to the previous rooms, the ceiling is low and there is a lot less space, using spatial experience to echo the claustrophobia of the ghetto. In these tilted rooms the visitor is invited to explore ghetto life. Screens shaped as the ghetto as seen on the map show montage videos of pictures of daily life. This is complemented by information on ghetto collaborators and the underground resistance presented in drawers built in the wall, hidden from plain sight as was the resistance, showing the multiplicity of narratives within the ghetto life. The exhibition continues up the stairs and onto a bridge, made to mimic the one that connected the small and big ghettos from which Jews could see what life looked like in the rest of

Warsaw. Large panels with pictures of idyllic life are visible from the bridge to recreate the eﬀect. The visitor is then led down to a black space that represents the end of the Warsaw Ghetto. First, the visitor can see the story of the suicide of the ghetto leader and the multiplicity of reactions to it.

There is also one of the exhibition’s primary artefacts: boxes that were buried containing the Warsaw

Ghetto archive, from which most of the information in this gallery came. Further down the stairs the visitor stands on a recreation44 of a map detailing deportations from the ghetto. The ﬁrst part of

Holocaust ﬁnishes with the ghetto uprising, with a few more artefacts and pictures. The use of imagery and artefacts aims to tell the story from the Jewish perspective, in an attempt to lend them agency, and this is particularly visible at the end of the exhibition with a whole room dedicated to the uprising. Moreover, the very few artefacts that are used are not only for indexicality but to show where the information came from. This can be seen as a way for the museum to be conscious of its collecting practices and to reinforce the story’s authenticity.

The next part of the exhibition is told from the non-Jewish perspective and, for continuity, leads from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising space into a room with the uprising symbol on the wall.

There are also pictures of the ghetto burning, as seen by people living in the rest of the city. This is

44 The original hangs in the room. It was drawn by ghetto resident Henryk Rudnicki.

45 the space seen from the bridge; yet, on entering it, life outside the ghetto is shown not to have been as good as it looked: on the reverse of the panels showing idyllic images there are graphs and information detailing the oppression the Polish population faced from the German occupiers. To show what the population knew of the ghetto there is an installation of the inside of a tram, through the windows of which the visitor can see into the ghetto (Appendix 1). While mentioning that the non-

Jewish population was also oppressed, this part of the narrative explains that the suﬀering in the ghetto was visible and yet the majority of the population chose to ignore it or even to collaborate with the Germans for personal gain.45 The next room presents the resistance that helped Jews and then a black-and-white room presents the Jews who managed to survive either by hiding (presented in the black part of the room) or by adopting an alternative identity (white part of the room). To discover those who hid visitors must lean in to see text and images through a narrow slit in the wall,

‘embodying’ their hiding experience. The second part of the chapter presents the diﬀerent paths of action taken by individuals in regard to the oppression of Jews, as well as show how some Jews managed to blend in or hide with the help of their non-Jewish compatriots and survive the war. This part of the exhibition helps to show visitors that the Jewish community is still part of Poland’s narrative.

The ﬁnal part of Holocaust starts with the ‘Holocaust by Bullets’, listing and describing the places where the shootings were carried out. An installation of exposed white tree trunks tells the story of Ponary46 and the IX Fort, both located in Lithuania, where Jews were brought by the trainload to be shot and buried. The tree trunks symbolise the forgotten forest that hid the massacres in Ponary. In front of the ‘forest’ is a display dedicated to the Wannsee Conference,47 where the Final

Solution was decided. The documents formalising the arrangements are printed onto multiple panels, diagonally attached to a glass wall and on the backs of which are portraits of the men who participated in the meeting. Again, the human dimension of the Holocaust is emphasised: that it was created and carried out by people against people. Although the structure of the Holocaust is introduced as an extermination machine, there is still a human dimension to it. Visitors are then

45 This part of the narrative is only present in the exhibition, without any mention on the museum website.

46 Now known as Paneriai in Lithuanian.

47 20 January 1942

46 presented with statistics for the ﬁrst time: how many Jews were murdered and where. The last clearly visible part of Holocaust is a rusty metal ‘bunker’ dedicated to the concentration camp – one side showing the operation of Auschwitz-Birkenau as the largest one and the other telling the stories of those at Treblinka, where most of the inhabitants from the Warsaw Ghetto ended up. The parallel presentation juxtaposes universalist and particularist interpretations of the Holocaust, showing that both are necessary to an understanding of it. The narration ends in 1944, with the last transportation of Jews brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau, rather than the liberation of the camps, to show the experience of death and what the world knew at the time (Radecka-Mikulicz and Mockutė). The chapter ends with an empty white space to represent the absence of all the Jews who died in the

Holocaust. Although not very noticeable, as there is an emergency exit there,48 this space shows that there is no possible explanation for the death camps and therefore no way to narrate them. Rather than using the ‘happy ending’ of liberation, the curators aimed to show the impossibility of explaining the Holocaust.

The reasons we need to remember the Holocaust are brought in at the end of the Core

Exhibition with artworks created in democratic Poland and an installation of interviews with contemporary Polish Jews. As POLIN claims to be a museum of the living the contemporaneity of representation is important, but in the Holocaust gallery this is overlooked. Where the museum is successful, however, is in its main goal of ﬁlling the gap of the localisation of the Holocaust in

Eastern Europe and speciﬁcally Poland. As a stand-alone gallery it can be seen to disregard certain key issues in Holocaust representation, but, as I have discussed, in the context of the Core

Exhibition, the museum achieves its goal by contextualising the Holocaust in the grander narrative of

Polish history and the Soviet trauma and by localising Poland’s Jewish community in the past, present and future of the country while acknowledging their speciﬁc suﬀering.

48 The break between this space and the next was unclear until pointed out by a curator. Due to the location of a ﬁre exit it is not really distinguishable as a space left blank on purpose.

47 Chapter 2. Presence of Trauma at Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond in NDG

Psychological trauma, if analysed in the framework proposed by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the

Pleasure Principle (1922), is distinguished by not being experienced at the time that it happens, as the traumatised person is not prepared to comprehend it in the given moment. The relation of the person with the traumatic occurrence is not as much with the experience itself but rather the latent re-experience of it, as the actual event was not registered in the ﬁrst place. Cathy Caruth49 argues that through this latency history and trauma are connected, implying that historical memory is

‘traumatic’. History is a history of trauma as long as it is not experienced as it happened but only registered as such at the time of its recording: “a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (Caruth, 1991: 187). History is not an objective recording but a mediated interpretation of events, realised only in the moment of writing them down; thus all of history can be seen as a history of trauma, as events are only historical when they implicate others

(ibid.: 188). Hence the time of recording, or representation, of cultural trauma could be seen as the time of the actual creation or deﬁnition of trauma, making diﬀerent interpretations possible.

Contemporary art often represents trauma, whether personal or cultural. Dumith

Kulasekara50 identiﬁes the tropes distinguished by Grisellda Pollock that are often used to represent trauma and are similar to those used with regard to the Holocaust: perpetual presentness, permanent absence, unrepresentability, belatedness and transmissibility (2017: 36). Jill Bennett51 argues that contemporary art does not claim to represent trauma as it challenges rather than reinforcing the distinction between art and the reality of trauma: “although it addresses the realm of real experience in some sense, I argue that it is ill served by a theoretical framework that privileges meaning (i.e. the object of representation, outside art) over form (the inherent qualities of modus operandi of art)” (2005: 4). An artwork, in being identiﬁed as such, cannot claim to represent something else since its form and materiality are as important as what it conveys. What I would argue, based on both Caruth and Bennett, is that a contemporary artwork on cultural trauma has the capacity for a new form of representation (a counter-representation in a sense, as it has similar

49 In Unclaimed Experience (1991)

50 In Representation of Trauma in Contemporary Arts (2017)

51 In Empathic Vision: Aﬀect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (2005)

48 implications to Young’s concept of counter-monuments [1992]), which privileges the presence of trauma rather than the representation of the past. The presence is created by the materiality of the artwork52 as the viewer deals with an object or experience that is physically available to them, whether through sight alone or other senses as well. According to Caruth it is the moment of

‘recording’ the trauma that gives it meaning, making contemporary art a medium of trauma representation that acknowledges that; it does not claim any knowledge (or possibility of representation) of the past but points to its ‘contemporary’ origins that can only tell us about the contemporary experience in which we deal with traumas of the past.

The temporary exhibition Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond at the NDG in Vilnius, Lithuania was not explicitly concerned with the Holocaust. It took the city of Vilnius as a lens through which to view the limits of nature and human agency, and the many different ways to access knowledge. The collaborative creative process of the exhibition wove together scientific, curatorial and artistic research, resulting in multiple ways of looking at the city’s past, present and future. One of the artworks, Kader Attia’s film Reflecting Memory (2016), addresses the Holocaust as an inherent part of the city’s narrative, by comparing a cultural trauma to a phantom limb. The inclusion of this film essay feels like another way of localising the Holocaust – one that incorporates it into the present life of the city’s inhabitants. In this chapter I will discuss the theoretical framework that shows those unique qualities of contemporary art that lend themselves to the representation of trauma and then use this to analyse the artworks in this exhibition, particularly Attia’s Reflecting Memory.

Encountered Sign and Aﬀective Knowledge

The form of the contemporary work of art has a unique capacity to represent trauma as it acknowledges the contemporaneity of its creation and moves beyond representation. However, it is not only its form that enables it to overcome the issues involved in the representation of trauma.

Artists take a diﬀerent approach from academics to knowledge, both how it is created and conveyed to the audience. In order to write an academic work one has to make a hypothesis and then prove or disprove it. In artistic research and practice the hypothesis is not necessary, instead the process is

ﬂuid and allows to follow where the material leads. This allows for more experimentation and the

52 In the case of a video there is no physical materiality, but as it is presented in an exhibition with seats and on a screen, the sense of materiality is created through an embodied presence of the viewer in front of the screen.

49 possibility of continuous change. Howard Gardner53 identified different types of intelligence: musical- rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intra-personal and naturalistic (2011). Although lacking empirical evidence, his idea has been implemented in education, mainly that there are different ways of learning other than just sight and cognition. Multisensory experiences are common in contemporary art practices, both in creating the works and the audience experience. Taking these different approaches and cross-referencing knowledges and intelligences enables artists to address themes such as trauma without the constraints that are placed on scientific research as they do not (and cannot) claim to be representing them. The audience experience also involves ‘different intelligences’ as the viewer is often invited to interact with the artwork through sound, touch, smell or taste, evoking not necessarily different understanding but a curiosity about the subject matter, which could be identified as affective knowledge.

Aﬀective knowledge describes how a work of art can presence rather than represent trauma: it evokes a sensation that could be registered as the experience of traumatic memory, creating a curiosity in the viewer to understand the trauma (Bennett, 2005). Bennett bases her idea on

Deleuze’s encountered sign, which claims that emotion is more productive in triggering profound thought, as it demands involuntary engagement (ibid.: 7). An artwork, or elements in it in this context, work as an encountered sign: through its abstraction and refusal to claim knowledge it leaves space for interpretation, inspiring inquiry within the viewer. An encountered sign does not only inspire but leads where the inspiration takes the viewer, as the artwork triggers an emotion and, through its structure, guides the viewer’s curiosity (ibid.: 8). However, the transformative diﬀerence in traditional representations of trauma and contemporary art is based on being transactive rather than communicative: it requires the viewer to interact with it in order for meaning to be created. Trauma in contemporary art is then shown to be political rather than subjective, transformative rather than a condition: an experience that emerges from interpersonal mediation, as all art generates its value through mediation, as argued by Benjamin (1992).

Affective knowledge can be seen to be similar to indexicality, as it uses a sign or a space to evoke a presence of something that is not available. However, Bennett differentiates affective

53 In Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligences (2011)

50 responses from artworks as evoked not from emotional identification with a person but from direct engagement with a sensation, as art avoids identification, mimesis and appropriation (2005). Rather than arising from human subjects, artworks often allow the viewer to isolate the affect itself, enabling them to focus on their feeling rather than identifying with another human being: “this conjunction of affect and critical awareness may be understood to constitute the basis of an empathy grounded not in affinity (feeling for another insofar as we can imagine being that other) but on a feeling for another that entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible” (Bennett,

2005: 10). Dominick LaCapra54 uses the term empathic unsettlement to identify an aesthetic experience involving both sympathy and an awareness of the distinction between one’s own experience and that of the Other, and that what the Other is experiencing is impossible to truly access (2014). Empathic unsettlement is when, rather than from identification with a person, as with indexicality, the enquiry arises from the audience’s own feeling, incorporating empathy but showing its limitations. In other words, it enables us to feel sympathy while pointing to its limits. Removing the single subjective experience as the starting point, as in indexicality, emphasises the multitude of interpretations of the traumatic event and that all of them are valid. Bennett argues that art does not represent an individual’s memory and cannot convey it but rather communicates a ‘traumatic feeling’ that can be understood by many and interpreted in different ways depending on their background: “if art cannot communicate the essence of a memory that is ‘owned’ by a subject, it may nevertheless envisage a form of memory for more than one subject, inhabited in different modalities by different people” (2005: 11). Rothberg advocates such an approach, which he calls multidirectional memory

(2009). It demands an acknowledgment that there can be overlapping modes of memorialising events that were experienced as traumatic by diﬀerent identity groups.

To represent cultural trauma in Lithuania and Poland there is a need for localisation, and I have argued that in a geographical and historical sense POLIN does that. However, I would propose that, by moving away from representation to presence, contemporary art enables localisation in both space and time: temporal localisation. Through aﬀective knowledge the feeling of trauma is evoked in the viewers, and they have to do work, perhaps memory work, to come to their own understanding of what is presented before them, enabling a personal experience that might depend on the viewer’s

54 In Writing History, Writing Trauma (2014)

51 background. This eliminates the fear that when represented the trauma will be forgotten (Lyotard,

1990). By facilitating the process of understanding in the present, not denying its contemporary creation, and presenting the material in a space that deals with contemporaneity, art allows a diﬀerent representation of cultural trauma that I call presence. This takes Caruth’s idea of the recording of the trauma as the moment of making meaning directly (1991), while also giving space for meaning-making to the viewers of the artwork. This approach highlights the need to incorporate the Holocaust into the broader narrative of Eastern European history, as a presentation of what we are now and what we want to be, rather than who did what in the past, thus promoting a more universalist narrative.

Contemporary art also suggests an interpretation that differs spatially from the indexical approach. Rather than just pointing to the place where it is based, it focuses on one place and its history, and, due to the lack of constraints in cross-referencing disciplines, makes connections globally. In her curatorial research project Frontier Imaginaries Vivian Ziherl stages exhibitions and events in different locations, the research for each of which was carried out on the locale and its issues, although many of the same works were exhibited. This curatorial approach, combining artistic and scientific research and thus different knowledges, provides a way of connecting issues that can at first be seen as local to a more global perspective. Initiatives such as Jonas Staal’s

Museum as Parliament, inviting people from diﬀerent backgrounds to voice their problems and connect to others on the basis of shared experience, provide further examples of curatorial localisation that bridges diﬀerent realities. The exhibition CityNature: Vilnius and Beyond positions

Attia’s piece on cultural trauma next to other works dealing with the past, present and future of the city’s landscape and character, embedding it in the contemporary narrative of the city (temporally localised). This kind of localisation is intersectional and facilitates Rothberg’s multidirectional memory

(2009), which enables a negotiation of diﬀerent traumas, thereby redeﬁning the boundaries of who belongs to the ingroup, as suggested by Alexander (2004).

52 Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond

The exhibition Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond was held for two months in 2017. In this short time it had a signiﬁcant impact on the NDG, both in its content, reﬂecting its purpose as a civic museum and place of education and the curatorial process. The NDG described it as follows:

The city is often seen as the antithesis of nature: we go "searching" for nature in the countryside, woods or mountains. Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond oﬀers a radically diﬀerent approach. It perceives the city as an ecosystem, in which Homo sapiens, despite being the dominant element, is not the author. According to the creators of the exhibition, while dwelling in the city, we still live in nature, and we have to deal with its laws in the most unexpected ways.

This exhibition combines art and science: it presents ﬁve new contemporary works of art, created by artists in collaboration with scientists; and six scientiﬁc studies, accompanied by creative visual presentations, which were developed by scientists in collaboration with the exhibition curators.

The studies reveal the evolution of man's role in the ecosystem of Vilnius from the 13th to the 21st centuries, from the foundation of the city in a hilly area, to the prospect of the eﬀects of climate change. You can learn how the increased population in the 16th and 17th centuries aﬀected people; how residents of Vilnius in the 19th century and in the interwar period struggled with invisible natural threats; and how the Soviet legacy turned into vegetation on rubbish dumps.

The participating artists offer an alternative view of contemporary Vilnius. What would the city look like through a bat's "ears"? How similar is Vilnius' anthill policy to its urban policy? Will robots concur with us in the ecosystem of the city? Can you compare the loss of community with the loss of a limb? What happens when 99.9 per cent of the laws of physics cease to affect us? These are the questions the artists ask, providing visitors with an intriguing opportunity to find, and even feel, the answers themselves. (‘Miesto Gamta: Pradedant Vilniumi’)

The exhibition thus claims to provide a different perspective on an important topic to the museum and its local audience – the city it is located in – but also an example for examining other cities. Mikalajūnė describes the choice of focus on the city as a defined territory both physically and conceptually, in which research is carried out. The idea of the exhibition was to take the city as a point through and in which to approach different contexts, such as the history of contemporaneity and locality, international contemporary art, science and art history (Mikalajūnė and Mockutė). The exhibition was loosely based on scientific research, mainly PhD projects from various scientific disciplines; however, the curatorial process moved away from the scientific method (Mikalajūnė and

Mockutė). The scientiﬁc projects were all related to Vilnius in some way – whether its past, future,

53 landscape or culture. The curators wanted to show the variety of research that demonstrates the city as its own ecosystem (Burokas and Mockutė). The synthesis of man and nature – less present in the city than the countryside – is brought into question by comparing it to an anthill – a natural object that functions as a city. Yet, rather than claiming scientiﬁc truth as a doctoral thesis would, the juxtaposition of science and art asks the audience to bring their own interpretations and answers.

The open-ended nature of the exhibition was aligned with the museum’s goal to become a space for communication between artists, curators and the audience, and, in this case, scientists as well.

The exhibition was held in the NDG’s temporary exhibition space, which is a traditional white cube. Small purple rooms were built for two works in the middle, creating a feeling of connectedness and cohesion between them. The design was minimalistic overall, allowing the modest number of works to stand out and interplay. Indeed, the interaction of the three main agents: artists, scientists and curators is visible in the choice of display as the scientific works were presented on the walls with illustrations prepared by the curators; for example, paintings of nineteenth-century daily life were placed next to the work on the personal hygiene of the time. The pieces were chronologically arranged from left to right, according to period. Juxtaposing them was art related to the scientific works, positioned freely in the space. For example, Attia’s Reflecting Memory, set in one of the small rooms, was in front of Traumas of Vilnius Adult Males and Females in the 16th-17th Centuries:

Implications on Gender and Lifestyle. The design of the exhibition underlined the interactivity of the creative process, but the lack of visible signs of connection between the scientiﬁc works and the artworks allowed the viewers to make their own connections, the research and the city, inviting them to join the dialogue.

The first layer, or rather voice in the dialogue of the exhibition, are the scientific works. On the walls of the white cube they are presented in various ways, visualised in collaboration with the curators of the exhibition. The first scientific work presented was Dr. Oksana Valionienė’s PhD ‘The

Spatial Structure of Vilnius in the Middle Ages’,55 which analyses the urban development of the city from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Based on material from archaeology, geography, architecture, geology and history, she created maps of medieval Vilnius. In the exhibition they were

55 Lithuanian Institute of History and University of Klaipėda, 2015

54 projected, highlighting seven major roads in the city and telling their stories, which were reinforced with images of archaeological excavations in the areas. The pictures acted as evidence and as a portrayal of the forensic nature of the work of a historian. This work introduced the landscape as a component of the city, how it has shaped the inhabitants, and how they have changed it, showing the interaction of human activity and nature from the founding of the city. The next work on the wall was ‘Traumas of Vilnius Adult Males and Females in the 16th-17th Centuries: Implications on Gender and Lifestyle’56 by Rimantas Jankauskas, Šarūnas Jatautis and Ieva Mitokaitė. In their research the medical anthropologists examined remains from eight burial sites and discussed the nature of the traumas identified on them. The work was presented by showing a map of the excavation sites – a text dividing the key results into five topics, each of which was illustrated by parts of skeletons and a medical or court book from the time. The curators of the exhibition added to the presentation five audio recordings read by actors from memoirs or court testimonies. As all the injuries recounted are conflict related, it brings a social dimension to the presentation of trauma and personalises it, as most of the stories were told in the first person. The audio brings the past residents to life, giving an intimate look into the reality that they faced in the same city that people were seeing the exhibition.

Two of the scientiﬁc works are presented similarly, as their themes somewhat overlap: Iwona

Janicka’s PhD ‘Vilnius Hygiene Culture, 1795-1915’57 and Aistis Žalnora’s dissertation ‘The

Development of Public Health Science at Stephen Bathory University and Public Health Conditions in the Vilnius Province in the Years 1919-1939’.58 Both works look at the living conditions in Vilnius from a medical hygiene perspective but in diﬀerent time periods. Janicka focused on two themes: the development of urban sanitation and the human body, from illness to eating habits. Žalnora looked at scientiﬁc advancements at the Department of Hygiene and their lack of implementation.

Both projects were presented with text, accompanied by paintings from the time depicting everyday life in the city, some supporting the claims made and some contrasting with them. Rather than just illustrations, the paintings by Lithuanian and Polish artists convey the atmosphere of the time and also what was perceived as worthy of depiction. They introduce society and government as agents

56 Papers on Anthropology, XIX, 2010

57 Gdansk University, 2009

58 Vilnius University, 2015

55 in the city’s formation and show how the human body comes to be treated as a natural phenomenon that needs to be controlled: hygiene must be implemented in order to be healthy. Humans become part of the city, and the inﬂuence that city life has on them is recognised, establishing a dialectical relationship between humans and their environment.

Vida Motiekaitytė’s dissertation, ‘Urbophytocoenoses: Syntaxonomy, Toxicotolerance,

Successions, Functions’59 looks into urban vegetation in Lithuania, specifically the plant communities in landfills, which led to proposals to turn them into green areas. This was the first of the scientific works to analyse the present, with a trajectory to the future. The exhibition presented the results from two landfills in Vilnius, using materials she used in her research: written documents, a map of a landfill drawn by the author, photographs and plants growing in sample tubes and dried ones on newspapers. A landfill, something that is seen as a man-made scar on the natural landscape, is investigated as a living organism, an ecosystem, illustrating the dialectical relationship between human activity and nature that a city facilitates. The last work is a scientific article by Dovilė

Keršytė, Egidijus Rimkus and Justas Kažys: ‘Near-Term and Long-Term Climate Projections for

Lithuania’.60 A look into the future based on climate statistics of the last thirty years, the article makes predictions as to how the climate in Vilnius might change due to climate change. Four diﬀerent scenarios for 2067 were presented, each based on a diﬀerent model of socio-economic development. Visitors were invited to view the climates of four European cities in real time, each of which could be Vilnius’s climate in 2067, depending on which socio-economic scenario takes place.

The cities were Brest (Belarus), Nuremberg (Germany), Uzhgorod (Ukraine) and Pecs (Hungary), and visitors could take cards with information on each of them, detailing their weather conditions.

Exhibiting Reﬂecting Memory in the context of Citynature. Vilnius and Beyond, focused on

Vilnius, positioned the aﬀective knowledge from the piece as an inherent part of the narrative of the city, as much as its climate and landscape depicted in the scientiﬁc works. It invited viewers to see the trauma of the Holocaust alongside other formative events in the timeline of what constitutes

Vilnius, rather than outside of it, as something that happened to the Jewish community only.

59 Institute of Botany, 2002

60 Geologija. Geograﬁja, 2015, No.1

56 Throughout the exhibition there were paintings by Jewish artists and references to Jewish residents, and, although not intentional, the fact that they were present in the ‘illustrations’ of urban life throughout the ages showed that the Jewish community was always part of Vilnius – its past, present and future – and the loss of most of it is a tragedy that should be recognised.

Dialogue and Viewing

The process of creating the exhibition mirrored the dialogue that was anticipated between the works and the audience. Mikalajūnė stressed that the curators did not want a clearly deﬁned theme for the exhibition, in order to leave space to grow and develop in collaboration with the artists. Of the four curators, Vytenis Burokas and Eglė Nedzinskaitė were from the museum’s educational department,

Eglė Mikalajūnė was a curator of exhibitions at the museum and Vitalij Červiakov was an independent artist chosen for his work on the performativity of the city. The variety of voices created a lively discussion within the curating process, as theoretical and practical approaches from different disciplinary fields were brought together. The curators indirectly reflected on the Anthropocene

Project in Berlin – a cultural research project at Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (HKW) in 2013. In an attempt to reform the out-dated concept of nature, the main point of discussion here had been the idea that humanity forms nature. Hence, in creating this exhibition there was an attempt to think diﬀerently about nature and what ‘nature’ is in relation to ‘human’. Vilnius was chosen as the framework: to look at its development as a natural process, as an independent organism, not just created by humans but as an interaction of humans and nature, which is constantly changing

(Burokas and Mockutė). As cities are not often associated with nature this was an unexpected approach to questions of the anthropocene.

To create the exhibition and its narrative the curators began by inviting the artists into a discussion, so that their work would play a part in its development. Then came the idea to work with scientists; the curators found those whose work had already addressed different aspects of the city, suggesting them to the artists, who could choose to collaborate with them. The curators made visualisations of the scientific works for the exhibition, while the artists used the scientific research as a point of departure for their own works. This was one of the museum’s first experiences of commissioning new work, and the interdisciplinary collaboration formed part of the exhibition. Rather

57 than popularising science, however, the aim was to investigate the intersections of art and science so that the presentation of scientiﬁc knowledge would be complemented by the artists’ approaches, giving a combined experience (Burokas and Mockutė; Mikalajūnė and Mockutė).

The artist Pakui Hardware made Hesitant Hand (2017) for the exhibition (Appendix 2): an industrial ABB IRB 2600 robot randomly transports boxes with silicone pieces on them, which vibrate as they move. The hand picks up and moves the boxes without human intervention, producing an embodied experience: the arrangement of boxes only happens at the given moment, as if the machine is performing live to the audience. The artists created an autonomous ecosystem, as the robot was programmed to choose the boxes randomly. The work plays on the idea of the city as an autonomous subject, while touching on the themes of post-industrialisation, as Vilnius moves to a service- and knowledge-based economy. It also asks other questions echoed in the exhibition, such as those around the creation of art and knowledge: does the robotic hand create the artwork, or was it the artist’s concept, or even the programmer who coded the robot? This can be related to the debate over the universalist and particularist approaches to the Holocaust, and whether the

‘author’ of the act is the one with the intent or the one who carries it out, or rather that both are essential to the result. Hesitant Hand asks who is responsible for what is happening – machine or human. The vibrating silicone in the boxes appears alive, uncomfortably blurring the line between human and natural creation.

Kuai Shen’s contribution, Thermotaxis (2017) (Appendix 2), also created an independent ecosystem. In a small room an anthill stood within a self-regulated, custom-designed winter arch.

Red wood ants have always been present in the forests of Lithuania and play a significant role in the preservation of European ecosystems. A thermoacoustic soundscape was created from the colony by a thermal camera. Visitors could also see magnified images of the organs the ants use to communicate, as well as engraved Soviet maps of Vilnius and a ‘manifesto of the common red wood ant’. The work looked into the anthill as a city within a city, and inquired how the inhabitants survive and communicate in dense situations. Only Attia’s Reflecting Memory and Thermotaxis were in enclosed spaces; this was due to their physical nature, as they both required darkness and emitted sound. Another common feature was that they were the only exhibits to relate to the past – one to

58 the memory of the Holocaust, the other to that of communism: the two traumas ‘haunting’ Lithuania.

The reference to communism with the ant colony can be drawn from the redness of the ant and the image of the worker. The colony consisted of worker ants with no hierarchy or intent (and thus greed); yet the anthill is built and maintained – an ideal communist community. The lack of intent could be seen to consider human agency versus intent by drawing parallels between the city maps and the ant hill, the cross-section of which resembled a map. However, Vilnius’s many Soviet apartment blocks, whose ‘architectural inferiority’ is stereotypical of Eastern Europe, question human agency, as ants have always lived and made their anthills the same way. By creating a thermoacoustic soundscape Kuai Shen used technology to provide information that is unavailable to the human senses, questioning the limits of perception and knowledge. Immersed in the soundscape, the viewer could reﬂect on whether it had been created by the ants, the recording machine or the artist. Thermotaxis embodied the exhibition’s key question: where is the line between nature and man-made structures? The anthill is a natural city in the sense of many individuals living in a small space and depending on each other to do diﬀerent tasks to ensure everyone's survival. Yet we see the anthill as a natural phenomenon and a human city as something unnatural. Is it the physical material that determines the naturalness of things? But even concrete is made of natural substances. To see man-made materials as unnatural means anything made by humans is unnatural

– that what they create is not part of nature. But what does this say of humans? We belong to the natural world, so how can our creations be unnatural? Are the agency and free will that are supposedly innately human, the release from natural urges and the introduction of rational thought what makes humans – or rather human activity – unnatural?

The questions raised by the artwork gain a diﬀerent dimension from the communist past, which introduces the concept of cohabitation and society into the framework of the art. The city of

Vilnius developed rapidly in the Soviet Union, with many neighbourhoods consisting mainly of uniform apartment blocks, built fast, with the aim of ﬁtting in as many people as possible. This resulted in small ﬂats with thin walls, where neighbours can hear what the others are watching on television. Identical blocks were built throughout the Soviet Union, their presence in cities across

Lithuania a constant reminder of the past and the oppression it entailed. The anthill looked like any

59 anthill built by the same ants, mimicking the blocks, maps of which could be seen engraved in the installation. Yet the ants peacefully coexist and cohabit with other insects and organisms. Shen even described their relationships with each other and with the anthill as based on non-hierarchical and even anarchic individual decisions. This is the main diﬀerence from the Soviet block from the individual inhabitant’s perspective: the lack of choice and agency makes the living conditions unbearable. Of course, this is the artist’s interpretation, but the symbiotic relationship of the anthill and the forest (where they usually are) provides a scientiﬁc basis. As man-made urbanisation, the spread of anthills dominates territories and expands their turf as cities, as claimed in the Red Ant

Manifesto: “Yet unlike the waves of man-made urbanisation that began in Soviet times and which in this post-capitalist era is a relentless virus, we transform natural spaces but still contribute to the balance of nature” (Shen, n.d.). The ants oﬀer us an opportunity to see how we could realise a perfect communist society, raising the question as to whether human nature is responsible for our incapacity for sustainable coexistence.

The collaborative process between curators, artists and scientists that led to this exhibition reflects the NDG’s goals as a place for dialogue. The curators’ presentations of the scientific works, and the artworks that were developed with the help of scientists, were an example of how the contemporary art space has the capacity to enable collaborations not possible in other fields, embracing different ways of creating knowledge. The collaborative process also aimed to extend to the visitors’ interaction with the exhibits: the artworks and scientific works made no hard claims about the city but gave options or asked questions. Visitors were invited to participate in the dialogue, to create meaning and answers for themselves, and, due to the range of topics and approaches, could choose to engage with different parts of the exhibition and even parts of the artworks, depending on their own experience and curiosity. This made Citynature. Vilnius and

Beyond an example of the NDG’s idea of the museum as a place for dialogue, where visitors are provided with the tools to create their own meaning.

Diﬀerent Knowledges and Embodied Experience

The exhibition attempted to facilitate dialogue by oﬀering diﬀerent approaches to knowledge.

Surrounded by the scientiﬁc presentations, the artworks in the middle of the exhibition oﬀered

60 alternative ways of getting to know the city, and the artworks themselves. New to Vilnius, Julius von

Bismarck decided to experience it in an unusual way. Inspired by bats, the artist spent two weeks completely blindfolded, navigating the city with the help of a guide stick. During this time he developed the idea for his work made of steel Instead We Bent Wire (2017) (Appendix 2). He scanned an unspecified spot in Vilnius with a laser, and, using a wire-bending machine, produced a sculpture replicating it in steel lines that also mimic the stick he used to get around. It showed a different view of the city, while offering a representation of a space that had not been experienced through human senses but from laser-scanned data. Presented next to scientific research, it raised questions as to how representations and knowledge can reflect the real world. To create this work, the artist forced himself to experience the city, his research object, without the main sense that we use to orient ourselves in the world, thus taking a different approach to knowledge. Taking it even further, the work itself was created based on a sense that humans do not even have, pushing the viewer to think about the limits of our perception and thus what we know, and how we will perceive the world with future technological developments.

Shen’s Thermotaxis also makes use of information that is beyond the human senses. Its sound is the most scientific part of the installation, as the anthill is “monitored with a thermal camera using computer vision to transform the data into sounds: the thermoacoustics of heat produced by the nest material” (Shen, n.d.). This monitoring was used by scientists to explain how the anthill survives through the winter (by hibernating closely to each other and preserving heat) and interacts with other insects and organisms in symbiotic relationships benefiting the broader ecosystem. The artwork transformed the thermal data into a live soundtrack, as though the ants were communicating with the audience. This ‘live performance’ gave an impression of uniqueness, making it an experience that required an embodied presence. The connections between the different elements – the anthill, the engraved maps and the soundscape – make up the encountered sign of the artwork, as they raise questions about what is natural and man-made, about cohabitation in dense areas and human nature. Placing the anthill, which has inhabited Lithuanian forests and cities throughout the ages, in the near past with the connection to communism, the present through the soundscape and its physical presence, and the future through the possibility of a better city based on the ants’

61 example, Thermotaxis temporally localised the Soviet trauma, incorporating the urgent question of sustainability.

Julijonas Urbonas went further, with the encountered sign of his piece being experienced within the body of the viewer. Airtime (2017) (Appendix 2) was a kinetic sculpture; visitors stood on a platform that would drop a slight distance, giving the experience of weightlessness for a split second. At first it was not obvious what would happen, so that, when stepping on it, the visitors’ behaviour and relation to others would visibly change. The anticipation created tension, and in the less than half a second of the drop the people seem to return to a primal state – mouths open, screaming, laughing and even running away. Airtime was an effective example of an alternative way to convey knowledge other than through sight, as its visual impact was negligible (a light, square, wooden platform without embellishment). Experienced through the whole body, it was a truly embodied experience, rather than the spatial experience that Pine and Gilmore call embodied experience (2007). Moreover, it could be seen as the embodiment of the traumatic moment: the visitors preparing for the experience yet finding themselves unprepared when the moment came, with a feeling of a complete loss of control going through their bodies. It was an encountered sign, creating a multitude of feelings, including joy, confusion and fear. Despite the preparation and anticipation, and even the knowledge of what was going to happen, the weightlessness was still a shock, as it was such an unusual state to be in – one that induced physical fear from the loss of grounding. The artwork moved the visitors, literally and figuratively, leaving the question of why it was such a shock when they knew what was going to happen. In line with Freud’s theory of trauma

(1922), the ‘surprise’ came every time the visitor tried it. The embodiment of the unpreparedness for the impact that deﬁnes trauma in an artwork gave a unique way to understand trauma just as technology gave an unexpected view of the city as a bat would experience it. Both approaches to knowledge – one felt, the other reaching beyond the human senses – can be seen as examples of tools to understand the world diﬀerently and thus to recognise its multiplicity. Rather than saying what Vilnius is, the works of Bismarck, Shen and Urbonas provided visitors with alternative ways to experience what it could be, inviting them to reconsider their preconceptions.

62 Multidirectional memory

Burokas sees the history of Vilnius as a history of traumas, echoing Caruth’s idea of historical memory as trauma memory (1991). Some of these traumas have been made central to the national narrative, mainly that of communism, while others have been neglected as they do not fit in the national narrative. Although, as Mikalajūnė says, the museum has a duty to represent the past, as an institution that can commission contemporary art it also has the capacity to do this while acknowledging that the presentation is made in the present, thus reflecting the contemporary condition rather than the past. One might then ask why look at the past at all? But, as Reflecting

Memory illustrates, only by seeing the past as it was, without any mirrors, can it stop ‘hurting’ in the present. The diﬀerence between Attia’s work and a documentary that could be made using only the interviews without the encountered signs through which aﬀective knowledge is created, is that the former does not claim to represent the past historically or the truth objectively but rather questions its own claims and the views of the audience, giving them space to draw conclusions about what they have seen. Thus, the memorialisation of trauma through contemporary art moves away from the problems posed by representation to address cultural trauma in a universalist manner, promoting a multidirectional approach.

The artworks in Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond all posed questions arising from a physical experience or something the visitor notices, by drawing unexpected connections, such as the red ant and communist Vilnius. Rather than telling us about humans, the exhibition asked questions about humans and our relation to nature and man-made objects (Pakui Hardware questions the boundaries themselves.) It asked what we are as humans and what we will be in the future in relation to technology, nature and culture. It was left to the audience to think of possible answers. Citynature looked at the history of Vilnius from the past to the future, and it was a history of trauma (Burokas and Mockutė). Kuai Shen touched on the Soviet experience by inserting the ant ‘manifesto’ and maps of Soviet Vilnius, while connecting his work to the ancient past and present, as red wood ants lived there in ancient times yet were present and creating a soundscape in real time. The ant is as much a part of the city as its communist past, and the parallels oﬀered a dynamic understanding of the city, where diﬀerent narratives can coexist and be similar to those of other cities.

63 Kader Attia connected contrasting phenomena, from physical to cultural trauma, from colonialism in Jamaica to the Holocaust in Lithuania. The Holocaust was contextualised by other culturally traumatic experiences, both globally, when compared to slavery, and locally, compared to the Soviet experience. This relates to Ziherl’s Frontier Imaginaries approach to the making of exhibitions, where an analysis of a particular location draws parallels with events and places elsewhere. Although the universalist perception of the Holocaust can be seen to claim that it is incomparable, the more important message it conveys in my framework is that rather than a

German-speciﬁc trauma, it could happen in any society – and has. I would argue that comparing traumas is crucial in the process of internalising the Holocaust in the post-Soviet space, as one of the main reasons for the failure to address the Holocaust is the trauma of the communist dictatorship, and the lack of recognition of this trauma within a global context in comparison to the

Holocaust. It would be ridiculous to try to determine which trauma was bigger or more important, but the acknowledgment of both is crucial for post-Communist communities to work through each of them. Attia’s work can be characterised as a multidirectional memory piece, as it can be related to other traumatic experiences, as proposed by Rothberg (2009). Yet, rather than acting as a nationalistic distortion of the Holocaust, it expands the idea of the ‘core nation’, as argued by

Alexander (2004). As the history of Vilnius could be seen as a history of trauma for speciﬁc groups of people throughout the ages (Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, Belarusians and Ukrainians) it seems that the only way to tell its story is by bringing them all together and showing them as a human tragedy.

Some of Reﬂecting Memory’s ‘encountered signs’ were the images of people with phantom limbs ﬁlmed in abandoned locations. This was because they were shown gradually; for most of the

film it was not clear that they had lost one of their limbs: there were carefully placed mirrors reflecting their existing limb and creating the illusion of the ‘phantom’ limb. Until ten minutes before the end the audience did not know why the images were shown with the interviews; they were just people sitting or standing in abandoned buildings, parks, above train tracks, in an office and in front of a statue of Lenin. Then, through a simple change of camera angle, the truth was revealed, showing stumps in place of limbs. It translated into the fact that there is a missing part of the community that is not talked about in Vilnius – the Jews who were almost eradicated during World War II. In the video

64 a neurosurgeon explained that placing a mirror to create an illusion of the missing limb and then removing it while the patient watches can get rid of phantom pain: only through the realisation and acknowledgment of something missing is the pain alleviated. The ﬁlm of the interviewees was montaged so that a connection gradually emerged between the unrecognised cultural trauma of the

Holocaust in Lithuania (or slavery in the United States or colonialism in Western Europe) and the pain of a phantom limb. Its realisation pushed the viewer to acknowledge and understand the cultural trauma as the only way to heal. From neurosurgeons to cultural studies experts, the interviews created a detailed narrative of what it is to have a phantom limb and how it connects physical and emotional pain. A traumatologist says that almost all his patients lost their limb traumatically, for example in a terrorist attack. By this, the doctor means something out of the ordinary, where there is a sense of shock or an inability to predict the event connected to the feeling of the pain – a causal relationship between psychological trauma and physical pain in the case of the phantom limb. It has proven helpful to position a mirror in front of the healthy limb so that the patient feels they are seeing their missing limb. Moving and stretching the healthy limb while looking at the reflection can relieve pain. Again, the film demonstrates that only by acknowledging the disappearance of ‘a part of the whole’ are we able to deal with the pain of its loss, and to heal. But with a limb it is obvious that something is missing as we have a clear understanding of a healthy human body; in a society it is a lot easier to seem ‘complete’ without realising that huge parts of the community have vanished. To create a visual connection between a phantom limb and cultural trauma Attia’s film uses disused spaces representing the wound of a city.

Dub music was another encountered sign in the artwork. Musicians explained that the

Jamaican genre had originated in communities that had suﬀered colonialism and slavery. They needed to express their losses, yet no sound seemed to embody the emptiness they felt. Only silence, as in the case of many Holocaust representations, can represent what is no longer there.

Through the subtraction of the beat, dub music shocks the listener: the ear expects the beat of a song to be regular and quickly learns when to expect the next beat. When it does not come in as predicted, or in other words is subtracted, the listener is shocked. If the pattern continues changing, even when trying to anticipate an interruption in the beat, it still comes as a shock when it is missed,

65 leaving a very noticeable silence. Thus the incorporation of dub music, with its expression of trauma, acts as a further portrayal of absence – one that developed from the grassroots with no knowledge of the theories of representing the Holocaust.

Attia’s Reflecting Memory succeeded in connecting personal physical and psychological trauma to cultural trauma, and relating to cultural traumas around the world, linking the personal, communal and global through trauma. By making these connections and engaging in different knowledges, artistic research has a unique capacity to facilitate multidirectional memory, and can contain multiple narratives, depending on the viewer. Through affective knowledge the encountered sign is experienced differently in accordance with the viewer’s experience. The ability to connect different traumatic experiences and contextualising them in the history of the locale entails temporal localisation, which promotes a universalist approach to the Holocaust and encourages community building. Presenting Reflecting Memory in a contemporary art space allowed it to be received differently than if it were in a traditional Holocaust museum. The viewer does not expect to encounter trauma in an art museum – or certainly less than in a historical museum. The unexpectedness creates a personal, embodied relationship with the trauma, emphasised by the need of the viewer to be present in front of the artwork to experience it; and as it is a contemporary artwork it does not claim to represent a trauma that occurred in the past but rather an interpretation that is created in the present – a contemporaneity I would call presence. Including Reflecting Memory in Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond enabled a temporal localisation of the memory of the Holocaust, not only by placing it in a specific location but in relation to others, positioned not in the past but in the present. Given that traumatic memory exists at the time it is encountered, this would seem the most effective and productive method for the recognition of the Holocaust in post-Soviet countries. The main obstacle to recognising the Holocaust is its incompatibility with the contemporary national narrative, so placing these questions in the present facilitates greater understanding for the future.

Although not an exhibition of the Holocaust, Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond incorporated

Attia’s Reﬂecting Memory into the broader narrative of the city. It set out to examine the city as a way to ask about the relationship between nature and human activity and agency – a question that is also at the core of the debate on Holocaust representation with particularist and universalist approaches.

66 In inviting artists and scientists to collaborate, the curators hoped to create a polyphonic narrative, showing that there are many ways to address trauma and experience the injuries. Through the use of embodied experience and diﬀerent approaches to knowledge the exhibition facilitates a dialogue with its viewers on what the city is for them. Reﬂecting Memory furthers this by creating not a representation but a presence of the Holocaust in the exhibition, requiring that the viewer be present to experience it and highlighting that the contemporary creation of the ‘representation’ is as important in the perception of the occurrence as the occurrence itself. By connecting the trauma of the Holocaust to the city of Vilnius, as well as to other traumas elsewhere, Attia’s work temporally localises the Holocaust in Lithuania, creating a multidirectional representation that sees remembrance not as a zero-sum game but rather something that is enriched by multiplicity.

67 Chapter 3. Spatial Temporality and the Holocaust

Having examined the visions of POLIN and the NDG as national museums, and analysing how they represented the Holocaust in their exhibitions, including the tools they employed in the presentations, it is clear that many approaches can be taken. Indeed, the case studies of POLIN’s

Holocaust gallery and Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond, with Kader Attia’s Reflecting Memory, represent the Holocaust very differently. The first is straightforward, with the title of the exhibition chapter being Holocaust; the other does not refer to the Holocaust directly. Both, however, represent the Holocaust with a specific focus on the cities where the museums are located. Built on the site of the Warsaw ghetto, POLIN dedicates part of its exhibition to that heroic story; whereas Citynature explores Vilnius and includes a ‘representation’ of the Holocaust as an inherent part of the city’s narrative. As capital cities, Warsaw and Vilnius each have great significance in their national narratives, and taking the city as a key ‘character’ in the representation allows local visitors to feel connected to the topic. Indeed, POLIN could be seen as a memorial museum, with spatial contiguity with the memorialised subject (Violi, 2012) given its location. But, since it claims to be a museum of the living rather than the dead, it tries to distance itself from such a definition. Both Citynature and

Holocaust are closely connected to the space and the history of the cities in which they are based, localising the Holocaust within the narratives they present.

Among the many differences making these presentations difficult to compare is the fact that one sets out to represent the Holocaust in Poland while the other is an exhibition of Vilnius that touches upon the Holocaust as part of the city’s narrative. As discussed in the introduction, Poland and Lithuania had different experiences of the Holocaust and have dealt with it differently since

(although both face the key issues that are prevalent in most Eastern European countries that experienced Nazi occupation and Soviet oppression). Another key diﬀerence is that Holocaust is a narrative-based exhibition, part of the permanent presentation in a historical museum, and Citynature was a temporary, contemporary art exhibition in an art museum. However, the diﬀerences are important in their capacity to represent and localise the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Both presentations succeed in localising it, in Wawrzyniak and Pakier’s terms (2013). Nonetheless,

Holocaust fails to represent it fully as it does the memory work for the audience and relies too heavily

68 on language to convey it. The artworks in Citynature do not represent the Holocaust so much as presence it by demanding that the audience create meaning through aﬀective knowledge. Rather than claiming to represent the Holocaust it oﬀers a contemporary interpretation.

POLIN’s core exhibition relies heavily on quotes to convey its narrative. One reason for this is a lack of artefacts, as the museum has a very small collection. The other is that the use of the original language is believed to create a feeling of authenticity, as it presents testimony that has not been reinterpreted by the museum. Reading what people wrote at the time brings visitors close to the reality of the experience. However, by choosing the quotes and arranging them in the exhibition the curators performed mediation that inﬂuences how they are read and the meaning they convey.

According to Lyotard, in memorialising the Holocaust a museum does the memory work that should be done by the audience, thus releasing them from the task of remembering it themselves (1990).

Moreover, since language alone is incapable of conveying the horrors of the Holocaust, its representation through quotes cannot be seen as authentic. By claiming authenticity in arranging the quotes and asking visitors not to bring their preconceptions to bear, POLIN’s curators make an invalid representation of the Holocaust. It could be more successful if they acknowledged the mediation involved in arranging the quotes and allowed an interaction between the visitors’ understanding and the exhibition presentation. Contrastingly, to introduce the topic of the Holocaust into their exhibition the NDG used contemporary artworks, which did not rely on language or claim to represent the Holocaust. In Kader Attia’s Reﬂecting Memory the topic is introduced through an encountered sign, which, rather than explaining or representing something, ‘plants a seed’ for enquiry within the viewer through an emotional impact. This means the audience must do the memory work of understanding what the Holocaust means for them. Furthermore it does not try to represent the past: it does not force the audience to imagine what the Holocaust was; rather it asks what it means for our current society, showing that the Holocaust needs to be and can only be understood through a contemporary understanding. The artwork tells us about a phantom limb rather than the accident that caused the limb to be lost. By introducing a contemporary understanding of what the Holocaust means for our society and demanding critical inquiry from the viewer through encountered signs, Reﬂecting Memory does not represent the Holocaust but

69 presences it. The diﬀerence between Holocaust and Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond is therefore directly linked to the museums’ goals and who creates meaning in the exhibition. The former uses authentic narrative to create an experience and the latter aimed to create a dialogue with the visitor, making the museum a place for reﬂection. It could be argued that attempting to represent the

Holocaust is the former’s downfall, as it is an impossible task, and by not trying to represent it but rather to oﬀer a contemporary interpretation Citynature managed to presence the Holocaust in

Eastern Europe.

The ‘representation’ of the Holocaust diﬀers between the two exhibitions not only in form but in content, or the understanding of the Holocaust they aimed to convey. The museums’ mission statements explain whom they aim to represent. For POLIN it is Polish Jews and for the NDG it is all

Lithuanians, or more precisely Lithuanian art. In the framework of Holocaust studies it could be said that one is a particularist approach that emphasises the speciﬁc identities involved in the cultural trauma and the other is more universalist, seeing it as a common human tragedy. So, as a museum of Polish Jews, those POLIN represents are not understood to be part of the Poland’s ‘core nation’, while those represented at the NDG are considered to be Lithuanian and part of the ‘core nation’. As museums are places where identity is formed and stabilised (Lowenthal, 1998), this should be a key consideration for both. A key criticism of countries like Lithuania and Poland is that they view the

Holocaust as a speciﬁcally Jewish tragedy, prioritising the traumas of the ‘core nation’, mainly those inﬂicted by communist dictatorship. POLIN has responded to this by dedicating itself to the Polish

Jewish identity. However, one of the main diﬃculties of incorporating the Holocaust narrative (as developed in the West) in Eastern Europe is its incompatibility with national narratives based on victimhood, particularly of Soviet oppression (and of Nazi occupation, although the former lasted ten times longer and thus has greater emphasis). Moreover, Eastern countries feel that their double trauma is dismissed as their neighbours in the West play with Soviet memorabilia while the swastika is banned in most developed countries. Reﬂecting Memory proposes a multidirectional memory approach to this topic that touches upon cultural traumas like the Holocaust and Soviet oppression, as well as those that happened (and are still happening) elsewhere, such as slavery and colonialism.

Yet rather than comparing the horror of the Holocaust to other unthinkable phenomena it validates

70 everyone's pain. It does this by conveying its message indirectly through encountered signs so that the viewer can create meaning by relating what they see to their own experience. Such an approach to the Holocaust and cultural trauma in general can be called temporal localisation as it contextualises the trauma among other events in the location it is concerned with and connects it to cultural traumas elsewhere. The Holocaust is certainly incomparable; it affected mainly Jews,61 and must be acknowledged in Lithuania and Poland, where it was the most brutal and is still not incorporated into the collective imagination; but it should be remembered not as something that hurt them but something that inflicted a wound on all Lithuanians and Poles, whether they helped victims, were bystanders or were perpetrators, since it affects society to this day and will continue to do so until the wound is made visible.

Although there are many diﬀerences between POLIN and NDG and how they represent the

Holocaust, both are examples of a move towards an incorporation of the Holocaust as both a Jewish and a national tragedy for Poland and Lithuania. The overarching theme of my chosen case studies is an engagement with the difficulties of representing Holocaust in places where it is both the most difficult to talk about, and needs to be talked about the most. Although coming from different disciplines and with different goals in my mind, by immersing the subject in the locale - the country and the city - they bring the topic closer to the audience and invite a reflection of the Holocaust as something that should be remembered in contemporary society, and especially in Poland, where most of the concentration camps where, and in Lithuania, where people were brought to be executed from all over Europe. Even though it could be said that the political climate and the development of the discussion vary in Lithuania and Poland as shown in the introduction, as there is a growing trend in strong right-wing nationalism, museum representations, whether in art or historical museums can act as islands of reflection. As POLIN and NDG are national museums which attract very different crowds, they both are examples of spaces which present an alternative definition of the national narratives and who is included in the ‘core nation’, even though with varying degrees of dialogue with the audience.

The discussion of diﬃcult representation, especially in Holocaust studies as one of the most researched traumas in academia can be beneﬁcial for rethinking museums in the globalising world.

61 Roma, Sinti, disabled people and homosexuals were also targeted.

71 Through the representation of the Holocaust, I can compare and inquire how completely diﬀerent museums approach the same topic, and how their “vision and mission” translates in exhibitions.

Through the critique of representation of the Holocaust I have shown how NDG enables the exhibition to be a place where identity is negotiated together with the audience, something that

Belting argues should be done in all museums nowadays (2001). But as I have presented, the negotiation is enabled by the characteristics of contemporary art: the encountered sign and presence is possible due to the representation of the Holocaust being in an artwork, and because of that not an actual representation. The way Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond incorporates different knowledges, from scientific research to physical experience of weightlessness, provides an example of how artistic curating can be beneficial for bringing the audience to think for themselves and what difficult subjects like the Holocaust means for them today and how that shapes their understanding of “Us”, or the “Core Nation”. Nevertheless, as the main issue of incorporating the Holocaust in the national narrative of countries like Lithuania and Poland is that it is not considered a tragedy that affected Jews mainly, POLIN’s approach, while not as successful according to critique of representation of the Holocaust, offers a way of seeing the Jewish community in Poland as distinctive but part of the Polish narrative from the very origin of the country as a nation state.

Through creating an experience of what it was like to live throughout the ages and up to the present for the Jewish community in Poland it aims to promote an idea of the nation as complex, but nevertheless united. By choosing to make the museum dedicated to the living, rather than the dead victims, the whole Core Exhibition similarly to contemporary art asks the visitor to look at events in the past through a shared understanding today, which is what museums should be doing.

With the loss of clear national and geographical boundaries museums have the diﬃcult task of changing with the times. As Belting argues, given that they shape identities, museums should involve the ‘owners’ of these identities in forming them, becoming places where visitors ‘become something’ while negotiating what they want to become (2001). Contemporary art exhibitions like

Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond start a negotiation process from how the exhibition is made to how the audience interacts with the artworks. This can be especially beneﬁcial for the discussion of diﬃcult themes such as the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, as it facilitates memory work rather than

72 doing it for the visitor through affective knowledge. Reflecting Memory, by temporal localisation, furthers this by offering a multidirectional memory approach to the issue, making it easier to incorporate it into the national narrative and blur the lines between ‘core nation’ and minorities within the national group. POLIN’s message is important and much needed in Eastern Europe: that the

Jewish community has lived in these lands throughout the ages and still is despite the struggles it has faced. But for the presence of the Holocaust, rather than creating an experience as in POLIN’s

Holocaust, the NDG’s attempt to create a space for reﬂection seems to be more productive.

73 Conclusion

The universalist approach to the Holocaust rocked the foundations of Western society by showing that a manifestation of modern, civilised society can lead to the almost complete annihilation of a fellow people. In the spirit of ‘never again’, a Human Rights framework was developed, in which every human being has the right to live, regardless of their national belonging. Although a concept that has its limitations due to the need for citizenship for human rights to be granted, it still paves the way to an understanding of humans as equal and worthy of living in humane conditions. Levy and

Sznaider described a ‘cosmopolitan’ memory of the Holocaust as exactly that, adding that Eastern

European countries’ understanding of the Holocaust will be what makes its memory impossible as a basis for pan-European memory (2002). This is because the understanding of the Holocaust in countries like Poland and Lithuania (where people largely stood by or partook in it) directly competes with those countries’ national narratives, which are based on the martyrdom of the ‘core group’ of the nation in the face of Nazi occupation and communist dictatorship. However, by incorporating

Holocaust memory into this narrative as a specifically Jewish tragedy in which locals took part it could be possible to expand the definition of what it means to be Lithuanian or Polish to include minorities that have always been part of the culture. Yet, with resistance to a universalist Holocaust narrative in Poland and Lithuania on the rise, it is questionable whether this could ever happen, particularly if the memory of the Holocaust does not come to be localised within the national narrative. Indeed, a Holocaust memory is needed where it is not necessarily seen as the greatest human catastrophe but one through which to acknowledge other human suffering, such as political oppression or occupation.

It is impossible to represent Holocaust in ordinary words that we use everyday, as they are incapable of conveying the horrors that the victims experienced. Moreover, since the survivors had to sacriﬁce their humanity to do so, no true testimony is available. Nonetheless, testimony is an important tool in representation since the witness takes responsibility for the truth and addresses a community. Even if there were a way to represent the Holocaust, it has been argued against doing so as it would take the responsibility for remembrance from people, thereby eradicating the memory work that must be done for the Holocaust to be remembered. From the discussion of the Holocaust

74 two diﬀerent approaches emerged: ideological-intentionalist and structural-functionalist. The former, particularist approach claims that the Holocaust was a speciﬁcally German problem that was carried out because of the anti-Semitic ideology of the Nazis. The latter, universalist view says the bureaucratic apparatus enabled the carrying out of the genocide, and it could happen in any modern society. Both approaches have limitations: one disregards that it was not only Germans who carried out the Holocaust and the other ignores the Nazi ideology. While a combination of both should be used to represent the Holocaust fully, the universalist approach struggles to be incorporated into the national narratives of post-communist countries and is therefore needed more in Eastern Europe.

Since it was concluded that language was incapable of representing the Holocaust, visual tools have been developed instead, mainly the portrayal of absence and silence. This is usually done by creating negative space to represent that which is lost. Memorial museums also use indexicality through the spatial contiguity of their location and victims’ belongings.

POLIN’s Holocaust gallery attempts to represent the Holocaust in Poland without being a

Holocaust museum; rather, the Holocaust is one part of the story of Poland’s Jews. The museum and its core exhibition represents this clearly, from its narrative to its architecture. The entire building is designed to look like the history of Jews in Poland – culturally rich and prospering to this day but with a huge gap in its narrative: the Holocaust. Starting a thousand years ago with the myth of Jews arriving in Poland and being told to ‘rest there’ by God (‘Polin’ in Hebrew), each of the core exhibition’s chapters reveal the museum’s message that Jews have always lived in Poland and form part of its culture. With no collection to work with, a narrative exhibition was made, using quotes in their original language for authenticity. Constructed on the same basis, the Holocaust gallery seems limited, considering the generally agreed inadequacy of language in Holocaust representation.

Moreover, due to the museum’s erasure of the act of testimony in presenting the quotes, it does not work as it should in Felman’s terms. Throughout the museum an experience is created by rendering authenticity, such as through the quotes and the spatial design, like titled walls in the Warsaw ghetto presentation. Yet, due to the lack of signs that it is a representation rather than ‘the real authentic experience’, the representation of the Holocaust fails. Nonetheless, POLIN successfully localises the

75 Holocaust into the broader history of Poland, particularly in the Postwar Years gallery that highlights the communist oppression and lack of memory work on the Holocaust in Poland.

POLIN’s focus on creating an ‘authentic’ experience disregards the fact that the representation of the Holocaust is made in the present to be read in the present. Contemporary art, on the other hand, has a unique capacity to presence rather than represent the Holocaust through encountered signs and empathic unsettlement, with one sparking curiosity and the other evoking empathy while still considering its limits. It asks its audience to create meaning themselves rather than claiming to represent something from the past; indeed it is not a representation but a subject in itself. In this way, an artwork on the Holocaust invites its audience to do memory work themselves.

Rather than trying to represent the Holocaust it oﬀers an interpretation concerned with contemporaneity, or what it means to our society today rather than what actually happened.

Moreover, as artists and curators are not bound by academic structures, artworks and exhibitions are able to temporally localise the Holocaust. This means not only contextualising it in the history and traumas of the locale but drawing parallels with cultural traumas and human suﬀering elsewhere.

The NDG is an art museum but also a national museum with a collection, giving it the task of representing its community’s past. However, the museum states that its main mission is to create a space where visitors can learn to interpret the past and create meaning around the past and present and how they relate to different contexts. As the permanent collection is a chronological presentation of modern and contemporary Lithuanian art, it falls to the temporary exhibitions to position this in a broader historical and geographical context. Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond attempted to do this by using the framework of the city of Vilnius to raise broader questions about the past, present and future of the city, country and global condition. From the creation of the exhibition to the presentation of the artworks, the process was communicative: between those creating the exhibition, such as curators, artists and scientists, and in how the visitors interacted with the artworks. Kader Attia’s work, Reflecting Memory, offered a presence of the Holocaust through encountered signs within the piece, presenting an interpretation of what the Holocaust and other cultural traumas mean for the communities in which they occurred by comparing a phantom limb to a cultural trauma. Presented next to works like Kuai Shen’s Thermotaxis, which deals with the trauma of Soviet dictatorship and

76 draws parallels with other cultural traumas, Reflecting Memory enabled the temporal localisation of the Holocaust in Lithuania. By presenting the Holocaust as an inherent part of the narrative of Vilnius rather than having affected only a specific group, the museum enabled a universalist presence of the

Holocaust, a contemporary interpretation of what it means to today’s society.

Next to the core exhibition POLIN hosts temporary exhibitions, which could be seen as following a similar path to the NDG’s exhibition. They aim to delve deeper into subjects covered in the core exhibition. The head of exhibitions at POLIN, Joanna Fikus, explained that they take historical events or phenomena and universalise them to enrich them with contemporary contexts and art (Appendix 5). They also do exhibitions of speciﬁc artists devoted either to their Jewish identity or interest in Jewish topics. The temporary exhibitions are an opportunity to present their collection, while also reﬂecting on contemporary issues in Poland. One example was Estranged:

March '68 and its Aftermath, which reﬂected on the events in a similar style to the core exhibition, with the inclusion of footage of an art performance that took place in the museum on the subject, as well as a comparison of the hate speech used by the state at the time and the language employed by the current government. This elicited disapproval, particularly in light of the aforementioned bill aiming to censor the portrayal of history; yet it showed how the museum engages with contemporary

Polish life – one of its main missions – and also employs art to present topics that are diﬃcult to discuss to this day. The temporary exhibitions could be seen to instigate dialogue by inviting visitors to make connections with their own lives rather than oﬀering an isolated experience.

As national museums, both POLIN and the NDG bear the responsibility of shaping national identity. Indeed, museums are not only where you learn something but where you become someone

(Lowenthal, 1998). An autopia, the museum shapes what it means to belong to a nation, and thus who can belong to it. However, as the borders between nations are becoming blurred, it is increasingly diﬃcult to stabilise identity and even more so to claim authority over what that identity should be. Belting suggests that the museum should be a place of reﬂection, where the visitors, or the ‘owners’ of the museum, can participate in the identity-creation (2001), while Pine and Gilmore argue for an experience-based museum, which transforms the viewer (2007). As a narrative museum

POLIN seems to embody the latter, while the NDG attempts to facilitate the creation of meaning by

77 its audiences, which could be seen as enabling memory work. POLIN appears stuck in the idea of the modern museum, which could be due to the fact that it is a historical museum, while the NDG tries to reﬂect on the contemporary, and by doing so invites visitors to take part in that reﬂection.

Contemporary art has the power to include visitors in meaning-making through encountered signs and moves away from representation to presence in response to the idea of the impossibility of representing the Holocaust. Both museums manage to localise the Holocaust in their respective locales, although one does it in a more particularist way and the other with a universalist approach

(temporal localisation). As museums can stabilise identity, both approaches are important in establishing the Holocaust in the national narrative and thus expanding the idea of who belongs in the nation.

As discussed in the introduction, although there has been a lot of progress in introducing the

Holocaust into Poland’s national narrative since the dissolution of the communist bloc, POLIN being one example, the attitude seems to have shifted in the recent years. POLIN has received increasing amounts of public criticism in contrast to the NDG’s exhibition, which apparently went unnoticed, despite signiﬁcant disapproval of its themes, judging from the reaction to Vanagaitė’s work. This was probably due to the fact that the NDG is an art museum and Citynature was not presented as a

Holocaust exhibition. Nobody expects to see content on the Holocaust in a general contemporary art exhibition, thus the introduction of the difficult subject acted as a Trojan horse. Sometimes it is only in the guise of an art project that topics can be discussed in public; in this exhibition Attia’s piece grabbed the visitor unexpectedly and asked them to reflect on it. Art museums can be seen as elitist and Belting suggested the museum creates a space for the ‘critical viewer’ (2001). It could then be argued that Citynature was a first step, treading the path paved by Poland in its reworking of

Holocaust memory. As an entire museum dedicated to Jewish history POLIN accomplishes far more, given the number of visitors it attracts compared to a temporary exhibition at the NDG. The topic would also beneﬁt from an analysis by non-museum-based representations of the Holocaust to bring them into the public sphere, such as the Kaunas Biennale in 2017, There and Not There, on the limits of memorialisation, or Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue – an artwork by Joanna Rajkowska in the centre of Warsaw, and see how audiences interact with representations not requiring a paid ticket.

78 The Holocaust is arguably the most diﬃcult cultural memory for Eastern European countries to deal with as it does not correspond with the image its inhabitants have of themselves as victims. As

Reflecting Memory suggested, regardless of the specifics of the trauma, by offering an interpretation of what it means for contemporary society – or presence – art can be a first step in bringing the trauma into the broader cultural imagination.

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85 Appendix

Appendix 1: Images of POLIN

Forest, introduction to Core exhibition. Panels with forest. Photo by M. Starowieyska, D. Golik

Zamenhof street. Photo by M. Starowieyska, D. Golik

86 The last installation. Photo by M. Starowieyska, D. Golik

Holocaust gallery, panels with life-size photographs. Photo by M. Starowieyska, D. Golik

87 Holocaust gallery, diagonal walls in the Warsaw Ghetto presentation. Photo by M. Starowieyska, D. Golik

Holocaust gallery, tram installation Photo by M. Starowieyska, D. Golik

88 Appendix 2: Images of NDG

Presentation of Oksana Valionienė “The Spatial Structure of Vilnius in the Middle Ages”. Photo by Vitalij Červiakov

Presentation of Rimantas Jankauskas, Šarūnas Jatautis & Ieva Mitokaitė “Traumas of Vilnius Adult Males and Females in the 16th-17th Centuries: Implications on Gender and Lifestyle”. Photo by Vitalij Červiakov

89 Presentation of Iwona Janicka “Vilnius Hygiene Culture, 1795–1915”. Photo by Vitalij Červiakov

Presentation of Aistis Žalnora “The Development of Public Health Science at Stephen Bathory University and Public Health Conditions in the Vilnius Province in the Years 1919-1939”. Photo by Vitalij Červiakov

90 Presentation of Vida Motiekaitytė “Urbophytocoenoses: Syntaxonomy, Toxicotolerance, Successions, Functions”. Photo by Vitalij Červiakov

Presentation of Dovilė Keršytė, Egidijus Rimkus, Justas Kažys “Near-Term and Long-Term Climate Projections for Lithuania”. Photo by Vitalij Červiakov

91 Julius von Bismarck Instead We Bent Wire, 2017

Pakui Hardware Hesitant Hand, 2017

92 Julijonas Urbonas Airtime, 2017

Kuai Shen Thermotaxis, 2017

93 Kader Attia Reﬂecting Memory, 2017

Kader Attia Reﬂecting Memory, 2017

94 Kader Attia Reﬂecting Memory, 2017

95 Appendix 3: Interview with Eglė Mikalajūnė on Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond

Interview in Lithuanian on Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond

Interviewee curator Eglė Mikalajūnė (EM) Interviewer Julija Mockutė (JM)

JM Papapsakokite kaip paroda atsirado, kūrybinį procesas? Ypač atsižvelgiant į tai, kad daug kuratorių?

EM Svarbu nuo pat pradžios buvo neapibrėžti temos, miesto gamta galbūt kaip toks kitoks požiūris į miestą kaip gamtinio proceso dalį. Kai atėjo mintis dirbti prie šito projekto dar nežinojom kad dirbsim su Vilniumi, net nežinojau antropoceno projekto. Kažkuria prasme šita paroda tikrai įeina į antropoceno kontekstą kuris prasidėjo Berlyne, ir po to nemažai tokių projektų vyko. Buvo labai svarbu nuo pat pradžių neapsibrėžti koncepcijos iš anksto, kad ji galėtų vystytis, kad galėtume atrasti ją patys proceso bėgyje. Iš pradžių buvo pakviesti keturi menininkai ir menininkų pora, ir pradinė idėja buvo kad jų idėjos savo kūriniams mus įkvėptų praplėsti ekspoziciją tiek meno ir mokslo objektais. Kazkuria prasme taip ir buvo, tik nėra taip visiškai schematiškai, ta mokslinė ekspozicijos dalis nėra surišta su moksliniu kūriniu. Kai kurie dalykai sutampa labai aiškiai, tas Kader Attia kūrinys apie traumą sutampa su XIX amžiaus ﬁzinėmis traumomis. Bet ne visais atvejais naujų menininkų kūrinių ar mokslinių ekspozicijų butu susiję, bet principas buvo tas pats. Tad menininkai sukūrė savo kūrinius, tada mes atsispyrėme nuo mokslinės kompozicijos. Svarbu pabrėžti, abiejose dalyse labai svarbu buvo bendradarbiavimas. Kai pakvietėme menininkus mes iš pat pradžių jiems siūlėm kad jie gali bendradarbiauti su mokslininkais, ir iš tikrųjų visi penki menininkai bendradarbiavo su tais mokslininkais. Jie duodavo platesnes temas kurios juos domina, su užsieniečiais menininkais ir lietuviais buvo šiek tiek skirtingas darbas, kadangi tie lietuviai geriau žino kontekstą negu užsieniečiai. Tai visiems menininkams buvo pasiūlyti keliolika mokslininkų kurie galėtų juos dominti, ir jie iš tų keliolikos tada atsirinkdavo kelis mokslininkus su kuriais jie tiesiogiai bendradarbiavo. Kai kurie tiesiogiai įsiliejo į meno kūrinį, kai kurie padėjo koncepcijai vystytis ir dar atsirado dar kiti mokslininkai kurie jau padėjo realizuojant ﬁziškai meno kūrinį. Ir panašus bendradarbiavimas buvo su kuratoriais. Realiai buvo padaryti remiantis jau egzistuojančiais moksliniais darbais, kuriuos mes kaip meno veikėjai norėjom vizualizuoti kūrybišku būdu, pasitelkiant tiek meną, tiek mokslo objektus. Taip padarant tuos darbus suprantamesnius ir labiau perskaitomus publikai, nes didžioji dalis darbų buvo disertacijos, buvo ir straipsnių bet visi buvo rimti moksliniai darbai su savo moksline kalba, kur užtruko laiko juos perskaityti ir suprasti, kur reikėjo kelis kartus skaityti ir aiškintis kas ten parašyta.

JM Sekantis klausimas buvo kodel art/science ir kodėl lokalizacija, bet man rodos kaip ir paaiškinote pirmame atsakyme.

EM Taip, taip. Principe buvo paimtas miestas kuriame vyksta paroda, bet miestas buvo paimtas kaip apibrėžta tam tikra teritorija kurioje vyksta lauko tyrimas, ir ﬁziškai, bet ir konceptualiai ta teritorija, ką iš jos mes gausime.

JM Ar žinote kaip vyko procesas kūrybinis būtent su Kader Attia kūriniu?

EM Iš penkių kūrinių trys buvo sukurti visiškai tiktai parodai, o du kūriniai buvo susiję su kitais projektais, tai būtent Kader Attia buvo vienas iš tų. Jis bendradarbiavo su penkiom institucijom, kalbėjo su žmonėmis iš viso pasaulio. Aš dabar už menininką tiksliai negaliu atsakyt, jis pas mus turėjo atvažiuoti bet dėl sveikatos taip ir neatvyko. Tiksliai nežinau kuriuo momentu jis sugeneravo tą mintį, ar iki mūsų parodos, ar vėliau. Mes buvom kaip vienas partnerių iš daugelio, ir buvom antra vieta kur darbas buvo pristatytas. Iš pradžių jis buvo rodomas Pompidou Duchamp prizo laimėtojų

96 parodoje, ir tada po keleto mėnesių mes parodeme. Tai šiuo atveju kas susieta konkrečiai su mumis tai buvo tas pats procesas kaip kitais atvejais, ji mums pasakė bendra tema kas jam įdomu - kad jo nuolatinė tema, traumos tema - ir jis prašė paieskoti gydytojų, psichoterapeutų ar dvasininku, profesijų atstovų kurie dirba su traumomis. Iš tų keliolikos atsirinko šešis ar septynis žmones. Be Laros Romper ir Gražinos Gudaitės dar buvo, kunigas Tomašavas ir chirurgas Gediminas Rauba, neurochirurgas, Dalia Kuodytė istorikė, ir bijau pasakyti gal dar kažkas buvo bet dabar neatsimenu. Jis pabendravo su jais, bet įdėjo pokalbius tik su Gražina ir Lara, tai čia tokia labiau vidinė virtuvė. su mumis daryti pokalbiai buvo patys paskutiniai ir iš tikrųjų tik Gražina ir Lara kalbėjo angliškai, visiem kitiem vertėm, įtariu kad kiti kalbėtojai nebepateko galbūt dėl vertimo. Paskutinės minutės klausimas, tai galbūt ir dėl to. Projekto vidiniai dalykai labiau susiję su 'deadline’ais'. Jis pats planavo į Vilnių atvažiuoti su jais pakalbėti, bet del ligos negalėjo, tai pakalbėjom skype. Jis norėjo ﬁlmuoti Vilniuje, tai jo prašymas buvo, norėjo ﬁlmuoti apleistas vietas ir aš bijau pasakyti, visuomenei ar industriniai pastatai, modernistiniai, bendro naudojimo ... Karinė bazė buvo, bijau pasakyti kur konkrečiai nes mano kolega buvo radęs tą vietą, bet tai čia Vilniaus vaizdiniai buvo įtraukti.

JM Koks jusu nuomone skirtumas tarp pristatymo tokio turinio nacionalinėje meno galerijoje, lyginant su tokiu muziejumo kaip Lietuvos genocido aukų muziejus?

EM Skirtumas tikrai yra, bet čia gal į tą kontekstą, mes rodėme pas save, bet žinau kad Gražina Gudaitė rodo studentams psichologijos paskaitose ir taip pat tuo metu kai rodem vyko konferencija moksline, apie smegenų veiklą, ir jie irgi prašė kad galėtų parodyti. Buvo Vilniaus universiteto gyvybės mokslo centro, bio-mokslinininkai ir neurologai. Mokslines renginys, neurobiologai ir ﬁzikai, smegenu pazinimo savaite, tai buvo visiškai mokslinis renginys ir moksliniam kontekste ir prašė irgi parodyti. Tai jie bent jau planavo rodyti. Aš labai džiaugiausi kad tas ﬁlmas perėjo per skirtingus kontekstus, dailės, psichologijos ir gamtos mokslų, ir turbūt kiekviename atrodo kitaip. Pavyzdžiui Holokausto aukų muziejuje ar jis galėtų būti ... Sunku atsakyti į šitą klausima, bet man atrodo kiek aš esu susidūrusi, kolegė pasakojo apie Holokausto muziejuje kad gali būti kambaryje, leidžia įrašą ateinančių žingsnių, tai meniniai sprendimai yra, tai kaip aš suprantu tai yra vis tiek tie paminklai Holokausto irgi meno dalykas yra. Tu holokausto muziejuje ateini to tikėdamasis, o meno muziejuje, tuo labiau parodoje 'Miesto Gamta' ne ... Galbūt labiau į žmogų žiūri? Tai va tokie dalykai yra. Nesusidūri nesitikėdamas.

JM Kaip tai gali pakeisti reakciją, galbūt netikėtumas yra pagrindinis skirtumas, ypač šitos parodos kontekste?

EM Svarbu ne tik su holokaustu, bet apskritai su genocidu, aš nežinau tiksliai, bet sako kad nepatyręs genocido nelabai gali suprasti, tai gal tada svarbu patirtis, kažkaip bandyti priartinti tą temą prie žmogaus, ir kai prieini per artimesnius kontekstus, įvairesnius kontekstus tai gali geriau suveikti. Kitas kontekstas, bet buvo draugas mano prancūzas, dažnai būdavo Vilniuje ir jis norėjo nueiti į genocido aukų muziejų, galvojo ten KGB muziejus apie šnipus toks vos ne juokingas. Ir galų gale nuėjo į tą muziejų, grįžo vos ne apsiverkęs, nes jį labai šokiravo. Man pačiai buvo nuostabu matyti kaip žmogus buvo sukrėstas, ir viena iš tų priežasčių gal dėl to kad ne to tikėjosi. Gal man atrodo, apskritai gyvenime kai susiduri nepasiruošęs ir iš anksto nesuplanavęs turi kažkokį netikėtą ir nuoširdesnį santykį, kuris gal geriau veikia.

JM Ar identiﬁkuotumėte NDG kaip muziejų ar galeriją?

EM Muziejus, čia nelabai diskutuotinas dalykas, mes esame dailės muziejaus padalinys, ir kaip padalinys mes pristatome XX-XXI amžiaus meną kurio nuolatinė ekspozicija yra grįsta mūsų kolekcija.

97 JM Kokia šiuolaikinio meno erdvės, muziejaus funkcija turėtų būti, jūsų nuomone?

EM Mano akyse tarp galerijos ir muziejaus labai paprastas skirtumas, muziejus turi kolekcija. Vis dėl to esminis skirtumas yra kolekcijos turėjimas ir neturėjimas. Kai kolekcionuoji net šiuolaikinį mena tai labai greitai tampa praeitimi, ir tada muziejus turi atsakomybę pristatyti praeitį. Miesto muziejuje atsiranda neišvengiama reﬂeksija praeities, ryšys su praeitimi. Tai aš dabar suprantu muziejaus tikslas aktualiai pristatyti tą istoriją. Mūsų atveju būna ir šiuolaikinis menas, mūsų konkrečiai galerija/ muziejus mes kolekcionuojame išimtinai, tiktai lietuvių, gal ne lietuvių, bet Lietuvos meną, bet parodos būna ir tarptautinės, tai Lietuvos matymas kontekste ir praeities pristatymas ... žiūrėjimas į istoriją aktualiai, per šiandieną. Tai yra kažkoks įsipareigojimas, bandyt atrasti naujos žiūros taškus į praeitį, nes dabartis keičiasi.

JM Tai šiuolaikinės parodos yra kaip kontekstualizacija kolekcijos globaliai?

EM Ir ne tik per siuolaikines, bet ir istorines parodas. Dabar turim architekto Oscar Hansen parodą, dirbo Lenkijoj, bet suaugęs dirbęs visur Europoj. Horizontalus kontekstas plečiasi ne tik per šiuolaikinį meną bet ir per istorines parodas. 'Miesto gamta', tarkime buvo projektas kuriame būtent labai bandėme įsiskverbti į įvairius kontekstus, bandėme žiūrėti į Vilnių ir paaiškinti bendriau Lietuvą. Vilniaus pozicionavimas tarptautiniame kontekste, meno ir mokslo bendradarbiavimas, taip pat ir šiuolaikinis menas, ir dailės istorija, žiurėti į XIX, XX amžiaus pradžios kūriniai, leidiniai, knygos iš dar senesnių laikų. Jie buvo įdomūs ir meniniu požiūriu, konteksto išplėtimas į šiuolaikybės istoriją, lokalumo ir tarptautinio konteksto ir taip pat meną ir mokslą. Pats muziejus yra žvilgsnis į praeitį, ir tas muziejus labiau nei kokia kunsthalle (cia gal ne visur galima pritaikyti) galima tiketis labiau orientacijos į mokslą, dailės istorijos mokslą, muziejininkystės mokslą. Bet tas mokslinis procesas, šiuolaikinio kuratoriaus procesą nelabai pavadinsi moksliniu. Bet humanitarinių mokslų kontekstas artimesnis muziejui nei kunsthalle ar galerijai.

JM Tai kas yra dabar šiuolaikinis kuratorius?

EM Nevertinimui, bet biurokratine prasme nėra mokslininkas. Jei paimsi žmones kurie dirba su XX amžiaus pradžios menu, XIX meno pradžios, jie bus PhD, profesoriai, didžioji dalis jų bus parašę disertacijas. Šiuolaikinio meno kuratoriai, kartais pasitaiko, kaip Julija Fomina, kuri ŠMC dirbam yra apsigynusi iš kuravimo, tai irgi yra ir būna, bet daug mažiau oﬁcialiai žmonių kuriuos oﬁcialiai gali pavadinti mokslininkais. Labai toks realus popierius. O kas jis yra tai ... nežinau, įdomus momentas kad čia Lietuvoj gal pirmoji karta kuri nuo pat pradžių orientavosi į kuravimą, tai Malašauskas arba Kreivytė, tai jie galu galu tapo menininkais. Tai jie buvo pirmoji karta, gal Andriuškevičius ir Jurėnaitė buvo kaip kuratoriai, nors Andriuškevičius labiau atėjo iš dailės istorijos ir kritikos, kuravimas atėjo pakankamai vėlai. Kreivytė arba Rainis nuo pat pradžių buvo žinomi kaip kuratoriai. Bet čia toks šiaip pastebėjimas labiau nei klausimas.

JM Tarsi tarp meno ir mokslo? Bet dabar labai daug meno dabar grindžiama ant mokslo, tai man rodos tampa kažkoks ‘mix’as’...

EM Kuratoriaus ir mokslininko … man atrodo svarbu yra dažniausiai šiuolaikiniai menininkai kurie dirba su mokslu, jie pasinaudoja tuo mokslu, dažniausiai net ne humanitariniu mokslu, bet jie galų gale grįžta į meno struktūras kurios nepaklūsta strukturoms, kurie nepaklūsta moksliniams reikalavimams. Aš pati esu kuratorė, mane kažkada yra kvietę, sakė ateik studijuoti doktorantūrą, bet man tas galbūt gąsdinantis dalykas būtent yra ta griežta struktūra, ir būtent ne tiek to kad labai sunku, bet tai kad net kai nebepasteisina ir tiesiog privalai būti tose struktūrose. Neabejoju kad yra daug parašoma ir įdomių disertacijų, bet tu turi būti pasirengęs įeiti į tą struktūrą ir dirbti būtent taip,

98 ir arba esi pasirengęs taip daryti arba ne. O tuo tarpu kai darai kuratorinį projektą, bent jau aš matau kad vis dar yra galimybių eksperimentuoti.

JM Yra partneris parašytas parodos, Valstybinis Vilniaus Gaono žydų muziejus: kiek ir kuo jis prisidėjo?

EM Higienos temai buvo du moksliniai darbai, ir tiesiog buvo keletas kuriniu žydų dailininko apie skurdo sąlygas ir streikas darbuotojų graﬁkos kurinys kur žydų darbuotojai streikuoja, ir juos paskolino parodai.

Appendix 4: Interview with Vytenis Burokas on Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond Interview in Lithuanian on Citynature: Vilnius and Beyond Interviewee curator Vytenis Burokas (VB) Interviewer Julija Mockutė (JM)

JM Aš rašau diplominį apie Holokausto reprezentaciją per šiuolaikinį meną, nes manau kad jis gali pasiūlyti atsakymų traumos reprezentacijoje, kadangi ji yra nereprezentuojama. Jūsų parodoje Kader Attia ﬁlmas man užkliuvo kaip pavyzdys to, ir dėl to pasirinkau ją kaip studiją.

VB Išimtinai Kader Attia gal, ta tema neišvengiamai atsirado dėl to kad jis dirbo Vilniuje, Vilniaus kontekste, tas kūrinys buvo vienas iš tų kūrinių kaip ir užsakytas šiai parodai, bet jis buvo kuriamas platesniam kontekstui ir rodomas ir Prancūzijoj ir kitur, bet kaip viena iš dalių filmo Holokausto tema kilo reaguojant į konkrečią vietos istoriją, tai tarsi nebuvo iš anksto pasirinktas pagrindinis ir vienintelis Kader Attia ... jis daug metų dirba su trauma, kadangi kalba šiame filme apie fantominę galunę, fantominį skausmą, tai jis apie tą fantominį skausmą kalba metaforiškai, klausia profesionalių chirurgų ir neurochirurgų, sociologų ir kitų, reabilitacijos specialistų, apie kūno skausmą ir šiuo atveju jis pasitelkia tai kaip metaforą kalbėti apie visuomenės traumas ir per šitą metaforą tada kaip tik ir išplaukia neišvengiamai traumos patirtos skirtingais istoriniais laikotarpiais, tame tarpe Holokaustas, post-kolonializmo traumas paliktos, įvairios represijos prieš konkrečias rasines grupes, rasizmas, segregacija skirtingų grupių ir panašiai. Tai Holokaustas tikrai svarbi tema, ir neišvengiama kai paroda buvo Vilniuje, tai buvo įtraukti pranešėjai, daugiau pokalbių vyko negu buvo panaudota filme, daug daugiau pokalbių, bet jau filmą montuojant susidėliojo taip. Aš taip bendrai išplėčiau, bet miesto gamta, paroda kai buvo formuojama kuratorių grupės, paraleliai buvo moksliniai tyrimai, užsakyti kūriniai ir nebuvo pasirinkta vieną kažkaip konkretų reiškinį išryškinti, bet per mokslinius darbus atskleisti įvairovę skirtingų tyrimų kurie nagrinėja miestą ir kaip galimai ne tik tokį kaip civilizacija ir žmogaus veiklos padarinius, bet kaip tam tikra gamta, su jos kataklizmomis ir traumomis, ir miestą kaip tokią saviorganizaciją. Daugiau aišku galėčiau atsakyti į konkrečius klausimus, nes ta idėja pačios parodos, dabar kaip tik ruošiam leidinį ir galima būtų jam pasirodžius dar labiau susipažinti su skirtingais žiūros taškais į parodą. Kaip jūs pasakėt, kadangi paminėjote Kader Attia filmą būtent dėl to kad jame yra jums dominama tema nagrinėjama tai dėl to taip pradėjau.

JM Papapsakokite kaip paroda atsirado, kūrybinis procesas? Ypač atsižvelgiant į tai kad daug kuratorių?

VB Čia reikia suderinti atsakymus su kitais kuratoriais, pasirinkimas buvo suburti tokią kuratorinę grupę turbūt, ir dėl institucinių priežasčių bet tuo pačiu mintis tokia buvo pasirinkti …. Eglė Mikalajūnė, ji dirba kaip kuratorė ir taip institucijoje pas mus, tada buvo pakviestas menininkas iš išorės Vitalij Červiakov, kuris turi savo kūrybinę praktiką ir tam tikrą santykį su miestu ir gamtos santykiu su žmogumi, tokiais tyrimais kuriuos jis daro įvairus, vaikščiojimo performatyvius, tada mūsų

99 edukacijos centro kuratoriai prisijungė, Eglė Nedzinskaitė ir Vytenis Burokas, tiek Eglė Nedzinskaitė, tiek aš pagal išilavinimą esam taip pat ir menininkai. Tai ta kuratorinė komanda tokiu būdu galėjo pasiūlyti visam procesui ne tik tokią teorinę prieigą prie aptariamo turinio, į visą tą medžiagą pažiūrėti per kažkokius ... meno praktikos prizmę, skirtingai mąstyti apie tų naujų kūrinių užsakymą, kaip žinot visi kūriniai kurie parodoje buvo eksponuoti jie buvo būtent užsakyti šiai parodai, užsakyti kaip 'comissioned'. Užsakyti būtent ne įsigijimui, bet būtent pasiūlius tam tikrą temą parodos, pakviesti autoriai dalyvauti parodoje sukuriant kūrinius pagal suformuotą temą. Pati tema kaip žinote yra miesto gamta, ir tai šiek tiek nužmogina tą perspektyvą tiktai antropocentrinę, bet šiek tiek pasiūlo tokį požiūrį į miestą kaip į tokį vos ne savarankišką organizmą, kuriame labai daug narių dalyvauja, tada atsiranda galimybė kalbėti apie higieną, apie bakterijas, apie nauja sampratą miesto, apie geologinį sluoksnį, apie skirtingus laikotarpius istorinius kaip buvo žiūrima į patį miestą ir jo gyventojus, ir jų traumas. Tada apie žmogaus veiklos pėdsakus, apie šiukšlynus mieste, kai juos likvidavus gamtinės sąlygos sudaromos, sąlygos augti kažkokiom invazinėms rūšims kurios nebūdingos lokacijai, kaip žmogaus sukurtose struktūrose prisitaiko šikšnosparniai žiemoti ir panašiai. Tada tas miesta nėra toks tiesiog racionalus žmogaus visiškai apmąstytas ir išspręstas darinys, bet jis yra išdava įvairių interakcijų tarp gamtos plačiąja prasme, floros, faunos ir jau žmogaus veiklos. Ir ta samprata miesto nuolat kinta dėl to, nes yra nuolat tokių veiksmų ir atoveiksmių išdava. Ir pavyzdžiui istorija kaip žiūrima, istorinės traumos, metaforiskai kalbant, istorija yra kuriama būtent traumų istorija, ir daugeliu atveju būtent ką mes žinome apie praeitį ir kokiu būdu susiduriame su praeities pasakojimas, tai dėl to kad atminty išlieka trauminės patirtys. Būtent iš kartos į kartą perduodama traumų istorija, tai šiuo atveju Kader Attia metafora, ir jo filme būtent, aš dabar visų pavardžių tų autorių tiesiog atmintis šlubuoja, visų pavardžių neatsiminsiu, bet sociologas kuris kalba tam filme, kur kalba apie socialinį kūną, ir apie tą fantomo metafora, ir kalba apie visuomenę kaip simbolinį kūną, arba kažkokias politines bendruomenes... tai jisai kalba būtent kad miestai yra tokie bendruomenės, steigiasi dėl tos fantominio miesto ir bendruomenės vaiduokliškumo. Kaip jisai sako, gatvės pavadintos mirusių vardais, etos toks visas kuriamas apie praeitį jau mirusių žmonių atsiminimo ir visos bendruomenės turi fantomo sąvoka būtent dėl to, nes visos bendruomenės susiduria su mirties reiškiniu, fenomenu, ir atmintimi. Tai toks pasiūlymas, kalbėti apie tą filmą būtent Kader Attia pasiūlymas apie tai, kad traumos kuria tiek savimonę pačios grupės žmonių, ar tautos, ar politinės visuomenės ar bendruomenės, ir Vilnous ypatingas tuo atveju nes Vilnius yra toks miestas paremtas mitu, tautiniu mitu, lietuvių tautiniu mitu, lenkų tautiniu mitu, žydų miestas. Nors Kader Attia filme nekalbama sakykime tik apie Vilniaus atvejį, bet paroda prasidėjo Vilniaus apmastymu kaip tokio miesto, įvairių perspektyvų susidūrimą, ir Vilnius pasiūlo tą perspektyvą būtent skirtingų pasakojimų: trauminių, mitinių. Tai ir vėliau buvusios parodos apie tai kalbėjo, čia tiesiog pamąstymui apie Gedimino miestą, apie geležinio vilko sapną, kaip religinis centras, šiaurės Jeruzalė, po to vėl kitas klausimas, kaip lenkų romantizmo miestas su Adomu Mickevičiumi, slaptom draugijomis, Baltarusam kaip jų tautinės savimonės miestą, Ukrainiečiams kaip trumpalaikė čia gyvavusi, Taraso Ševčenkos palikimą. Tai yra tiek daugybė skirtingų susikirtimų ir tokių naratyvu sutelkęs miestas, kad praktiškai priimti konsensusą kad visi išsiaiškintų savo teritoriją yra labai sunku. Dėl to mes vis dar kaip Gudaite sakė, neprisiimame kaltės del kolaboravimo, tiek nuolat puoselėjame tą traumos pasakojimą ir dabar aš čia taip monologu nemažai šneku.

JM Labai gerai, labai įdomu...

VB Paroda prasideda Vilniumi, bet Kader Attia ﬁlmas siūlo daug platesnę skaitymo prieigą, kalbėt apie traumą neapsiriboja konkrečia biograﬁne istorija, bet kalba ir apie kalifato fantomą, ir apie kolonialines traumas Prancūzijoje ir kitur.

100 JM Taip, o truputį atsitraukiant nuo pačios parodos, kokia jūsų nuomone yra dailės muziejaus funkcija?

VB NDG su savo pastovia kolekcija tarsi kalba apie Lietuvos modernios dailės raidą, ir ta kolekcija yra sudaryta įvairių kolekcijų paveldėtų pagrindu, nacionalinis pasakojimas apie lietuvių dailę. Mes neturime daug kolekcijoje žydų, ar lenkų dailės, bet kažkiek turim ... ir tų laikinų parodų funkcija yra rodyti, apmąstyti tyrimus tiek modernios dailės, tarpukario arba jau pokariu buvusių dailininkų autorinę kūrybą, bet tuo pačiu rengiamos grupinės parodos, ir ne tik lietuvių autorių, bet regiono autorių, lenkų autorių, vienaip ar kitaip susijusių su Lietuvos dailės raida. Ir čia akcentas būtų ne tiek ant to būtent nacionalinės dailės pristatymo, bet parodyti skirtingas įtakas Lietuvos moderniai dailei, ir kad ji nebuvo užsidariusi, bet būtent Lietuvos dailės palikimą, tiek per Kauno mokyklą, yra prancūziškų įtakų, Sezaniškų, nes didelė dalis autorių kurie dėstė Kauno dailės mokykloje buvo baigę studijas svetur ir parsivežė čia tam tikras tendencijas, tai keičiamų parodų atveju galerijos funkcija yra ne tik pristatyti modernią dailę, bet ir šiuolaikinę. Ir visos Europos, pasaulio muziejų funkcija paskutiniu metu kinta pristatymai nuo meno kūrinio kaip autonomiško turbūt, kaip savyje užsidariusio autoriaus kažkokių intencijų, link tokios tarsi edukacinės funkcijos. Jeigu seniau tas baltas kubas modernaus dailės muziejaus prissiimdavo tokią hierarchiškai dominuojamą poziciją, kuri pristato meno kūrinį kaip savyje baigtą, kaip modernistinį projektą, tai dabar galime kalbėti apie muziejaus funkciją kuri įtraukia žiūrovus ir lankytojus į tokią diskusiją apie šiandienos kažkokią mūsų būsena ir tokiai edukacinėje funkcijoje naudoja tai ką turi savo kolekcijoje, arba tai kas yra menas. Žodžiu NDG negali nutolti nuo meno kūrinio, nes tai yra jos pirminė funkcija, bet kaip komunikuojama meno kūriniais, arba tam kad parodyti kūrinių įvairovę neišvengiamai kalbama apie aktualijas. Nes šiuolaikiniam menui būdinga ne tik kurti uždarą savyje formą, bet kažkaip komentuoti kažkokius pokyčius, ne tik mąstymo apie meno, bet sakykime socialiai angažuotas menas, kuris paremtas antropologija, pavyzdžiui Kader Attia atveju, neišvengiamai kalba apie istorinius procesus, traumas, lūžius, ir tokiu būdu įtraukia tokį platesnį kontekstą, ir tada Lietuvos žiūrovas, atvykęs iš svetur žiūrovas, jis mato pristatymą ne tik lokalios problemos, nors yra ir ji pristatoma, bet paimta ta lokali problema platesniame kontekste įvykių pasaulyje. Kaip šiandien svarstoma apie šiuos dalykus ne tik čia Lietuvoje, bet ir Lietuvoje problema irgi ne tik lokalizuojama, bet aprodoma platesniame kontekste trauminių patirčių, jos reiškiasi skirtingai skirtinguose regionuose ir turbūt aš čia abstrakčiai plėsdamasis paliečiau tą temą.

JM Taip taip … Kokias galimybes meno erdve suteikia pristatymui tokio turinio?

VB Ši paroda, kuri vyko NDG buvo viena pirmųjų, jei ne pirma tuo požiūriu kad kūriniai buvo užsakyti, dabar kuriančių autorių kūriniai. Kitas svarbus momentas - kad buvo dirbama ne tik su menininkais bet ir moksliniais projektais, tai šita paroda buvo tarsi meninis, mokslinis tyrimas. Dėl to parodos dalyviai yra ne tik menininkai, bet ir mokslininkai kurių disertacijos buvo eksponuojamos, ir kuratorių komanda kartu su mokslininkais paruošė meninėmis, muziejinėmis priemonėmis. Tas disertacijas pristatant ne tik kaip mokslinį turinį, bet tą turinį padaryti prienamu parodos kontekste. Dėl to veikia parodoje keli sluoksniai: tam tikras mokslinis kontekstas, ir po to meninis kontekstas. Tai tas mokslinis kontekstas sukuria 'backdrop', ne tai kad jis mažiau svarbus, bet jis sukuria tam tikra kontekstą kuriame kiekvienas iš kūrinių pristatytu parodoje kažkaip yra kontekstuolizuojamas Vilniuje. Dėl to kad visi tyrimai kurie buvo pristatyti moksliniai vienaip ar kitaip susiję su Vilniumi: higienos tyrimas, paleoantropologijos tyrinėjami palaikai žmonių, kaip galima tiriant palaikus rekonstruoti pasakojimą tiek archeologinį, tiek gyvensenos įžvalgas turbūt daryti, tyrinėti dokumentai Vilniaus teismų, kai buvo patiriamos miestiečių traumos, mirtingumo priežastys ir panašiai, XVII-XVI amžiaus Vilniuje. Tada kaip sakiau, kaip minėjau, aš dabar tų visų pavardžių neatsimenu, bet tyrimas augalų, ﬂoros, klimato kaitos prognozės ateičiai pagal įvairius mokslinius scenarijus galima šnekėti apie tyrimo pokyčius ir su tuo susijusius socialinius politinius pokyčius, nes klimato kaita kaip žinome yra

101 politinis terminas, nes skirtingi politiniai judėjimai turi kitokį požiūrį, ir nuo to priklauso ateities klimatas. Tai va, tai čia yra moksliniai tyrimai pristatyti kurie buvo kuriami bendradarbiaujant su mokslininkais kurių disertacijos, ir su studentais. Buvo rengiamos kūrybinės dirbtuvės, edukaciniai užsiėmimai, taip kad paroda turėjo ne tik pristatyti meno kūrinį kaip autonomišką, bet buvo ir paruošta tam tikra problema kad žiūrovas būtų įvestas į pasakojimą, o ne tik paliktas su meno kūriniu, tokia, tarpusavio pokalbyje, bet kad buvo įjungta galimybe buvo įsijungti į diskusiją, kalbėti ne tik apie meno kūrinį, bet meno ir mokslo santykius, bet aš asmeniškai norėčiau pabrėžti kad man svarbu ne mokslo populiarinimo veikla, bet labiau kalbėt apie mokslo, įvairaus žinojimo įtaką meno kūrinių atsiradime. Nes tiek visi autoriai kurie buvo pristatyti parodoje vienaip ar kitaip įkvėpimo ir įžvalgų semiasi iš mokslo lauko, arba patys bendradarbiauja su mokslininkais kurdami. Pavyzdžiui Kuai Shen kaip etimologas tyrinėdamas vabzdžius nuolat dirba su skruzdėmis, Julius von Bismarkas dirba su įvariais mokslininkais, programuotojais, industrija, realizuodamas kūrinius. Julijonas Urbonas dirba su gravitacija, kosmologija ir kitais reiškiniais. Kader Attia kaip pats baigęs ﬁlosoﬁją menininkas dirba su psichologais, sociologais ir neuromokslininkais. Visi šie autoriai kuria kūrinius kuriem būdinga ne tik tradicinė meninė raiška kuri apsiriboja estetika ir forma, bet jie visi yra kontekstualūs ir jų kontekstas dažnai remiasi mokslinėmis žiniomis arba sociopolitinėmis, arba antropologija. Taip kad tie kūriniai, nepaisant to kad turi meno kūriniui būdingas savybes, kaip meninius sprendimus, montažą, kaip ir instaliuojami erdvėje, kokios pristatomos meninės įžvalgos, bet dažnai jos yra pristatomos kartais sąmoningai spekuliatyviai, bet vis tiek remiantis mokslinėmis įžvalgomis. Na ir Pakui Hardware kurie dirba būtent su robotika ir pokyčiais darbo rinkoje, kur žmogaus tarsi darbą keičia dirbtinis intelektas ir kiek tai keičia miesto kraštovaizdį arba dirbančio žmogaus situacija, kai jis tampa aptarnaujančiu personalu jau ir net ne tai kad gamtai, bet naujai technologinei gamtai kuri turi savo savivaldą ir algoritmai geba mokytis ir visokie distopiniai pasakojimai apie kažkokį dirbtinį intelektą kuris patį žmogų paverčia aptarnaujančiu personalu sau. Tai tas laukas labai platus parodoje pasakojimo, bet tarsi sąmoningai pasirinkta kalbėti kartais abstrakčiai, kartais labai konkrečiai, ir tas žvilgsnis parodoje buvo bandytas derinti, turėti skirtingą mastelį, nuo mikro bakteriologijos, net kalbėti apie miesto epidemijas kurios išguldo pusę miesto gyventojų. Tai visą laiką keičia makro ir mikro, kuravimo procese buvo bandoma jautriai tai apmąstyti, apžiūrėti. Kadangi tie kūriniai radosi parodos kuravimo laikotarpyje, mums susirašinėjant su autoriais, jiems reaguojant į pokalbiais su mumis, tai čia nebuvo procesas kur kuruojami kūriniai is jau sukurtu kūrinių. Kur tarsi sugalvoji kažkokį kuratorinį sumanymą ir jį iliustruoji pasirinktais jau esančiais kūriniais, bet tas kuravimo procesas koja kojon žengia su kuriamais kūriniais ir tik parodos atidarymo dieną mes pamatėm kas iš viso to gavosi, to darbo proceso, nes kūriniai nuolat kito, nuo pirmo sumanymo 180 laipsniu apsisuko, kai kurie variantai buvo atmesti, kai kurie realizuoti. Tai tas procesas šiandien galima pasakyti kai turime dokumentaciją, kad štai paroda apie Miesto Gamta Vilniuje, bet pačiame procese buvo labai daug nežinomųjų ir draminę galima liniją pasakoti apie kad ne visada buvome užtikrinti kad vienas ar kitas kūrinys iki galo bus laiku sukurtas.

JM Tai čia kūryba kaip skiriasi, kokia pačio muziejaus funkcija, kaip jis skiriasi nuo kitokių muziejų?

VB Kiekvienas muziejus apsibrėžia savo funkciją, NDG tarsi kalba apie meno kūrinius, kad būtent jeigu norime užčiuopti šiuolaikinio meno tendencijas negalime apsiriboti tik kūriniais tradicine raiška paremtais, sakykime tapybos darbą, yra tiktai tapybos darbas, kažkoks objektas apsiriboja modernistine refereavimui savo forma, medžiagiškumą. Šiuolaikinio meno kūriniai yra labai įvairūs ir dalis jų komentuoja tiek politinius tiek mokslinius kontekstus, dėl to ši paroda palietė daugiau temų negu tarsi paprastai paliestų, bet tai kažkokiu būdu gal mūsų kontekste yra nauja įžvalga, naujesnio pobūdžio paroda, bet visumoje žiūrint šiuolaikinio meno pasaulyje tai nėra kažkokia didelę naujiena, kad meno kūrinia, arba meno parodos rengiamos kurios aptaria ir politines aktualijas, ir istorines, ir meno sampratos pokyčius. Tai taip, tiesiog jeigu kalbame parodos funkcija ir meno funkcija nėra tiesiog edukacinė, bet muziejaus, kuri šiuo atveju yra valstybinis, ir jis kažkokiu būdu turi kreiptis į

102 žiūrovą, bendradarbiauti su juo, įvesti jį į pasakojimą, nes ji nėra privati iniciatyva, o menininku pozicijų yra ivairių - yra labiau užsidarę ir nereaguojantys į žiūrovą ir tik apsiriboti kūrybiniu procesu kurie nesirūpina santykiu su žiūrovu, bet yra autorių kurie nuo pat pradžių apsisprendžia kad jų kūriniai bus atviri, socialiai ... mūsų muziejuje ta edukacinė funkcija bandome išpildyti ir dirbame su labai įvairiom žiūrovų funkcijomis.

JM Kaip pastovi ekspozicija atspindi muziejaus funkcija? Dauguma darbų yra tik lietuvių?

VB Pastovi kolekcija daugiausiai yra iš privačių kolekcijų, tai nėra politinės valios klausimas, bet labiau ﬁnansinis - karts nuo karto įsigyjami kūriniai bet nepakankamai kad matytusi pokytis. Nėra dėl piktų kėslų, kad parodyti etnolingvistiniu pagrindu Lietuvišką dailė, galėtų būti daugiau rodoma, šiuo metu tokia turim situacija, bet ji yra keičiama. O apie patį Holokausto tylėjimo temą, tai nėra juodai balta, labai politiškai įkrauta tema ir žiūrint tai kaip ji reprezentuojama profesionalioje terpėje, istorikų yra viena, kaip ji yra pristatoma kitų grupių, kurie remiasi sovietine dokumentacija kurios teisėtumu galima abejoti, tai toks sudėtingas laukas. Kad tos spekuliacijos baigtusi irgi reikia politinės valios paviešinti, pripažinti tam tikrus faktus o ne leisti pogrindines spekuliacijas.

Appendix 5: Interview with Kamila Radecka-Mikulicz on POLIN and Holocaust gallery Interview in English on POLIN and Holocaust gallery

Interviewee curator Kamila Radecka-Mikulicz (KRM) Interviewer Julija Mockutė (JM)

JM What is the goal of the museum, how would you deﬁne the purpose of it?

KRM It goes in several lines, and this is actually our mission which I cannot recall word after word, but basically our goal is to learn both Polish and Jewish community about their common past, and to get into this history in order to live together in the future, or to learn from what happened to our mutual history. Because we are not treating history of Polish Jews asa footnote to to Polish history but rather as a part of it. An integral part of it. But in terms of museum mission I would need to look into and send the precise one.

JM Yes, it is online and I have it. Just a good way to start..

KRM What is very important is that our museum stands in the heart of the former Warsaw ghetto, close to Zamenhof street which was one of the main streets through which Jews were herded to be transported to camps. But we didn't want the Holocaust to be the most important part of the history we are telling because 1000 year history is the most important part. So we are presenting history as a continual ... and it is an integral part of history of Polish Jews, but something that, the history was inevitably leading to - no, it was just something that happened and presenting it equally as other stages of history.

JM What is the goal of the Holocaust gallery itself?

KRM Well we had several key messages that we wanted to convey to our museum visitors. And among them would be the fact that Holocaust happened on the Polish soil, among Poles who were bystanders and they were sometimes active, they could do something, they did things, or they did not do anything because of diﬀerent reasons. We wanted to make people understand that Holocaust happened in the occupied Poland among Poles as bystanders. And we wanted to explain why, I mean why Poland was chosen, because of the biggest Jewish diaspora in Europe and also because the terror that was, Polish society was suppressed with few years of terror. So this was something we wanted to convey. And also we knew from the very beginning that we did not want to end the

103 story by liberating the death camps, nor by some kind of possible reasons of Holocaust, because there is no possible explanation and there is nothing that you could hear that would make you feel that. So we wanted to end the story with a void, with a metaphysical gap, which you probably could not ﬁnd at the exhibition because of architectural reasons. There is this small white space that we thought would be bigger and closed up, and only some light and just visitors, and no narration. When you are leaving this rusty corridor, then you would almost instantly enter Postwar years gallery, but between those two there is tiny corridor, a part of it is white and this was in our intention this place to give a thought, or just grief after the what we have seen in our gallery. But because this is a part of the evacuation path and because there is, mainly because of the evacuation path, some kind of ﬁre safety reasons it looks as it looks - it is open and there was of course the story of postwar years gallery that had to be told so we could not get all the space that we wanted to do that.

JM In a way when you walk into the Post War gallery the war is very present, so there is no, as you said liberation, so at least that works, as you still have the barricades.

KRM And also we were eager to end our narration in 1944 which was the last transportations of Jews from Hungary that were brought to Auschwitz, and we wanted to end it there because well the experience of death in the death camps was the one of the majority of Jews in Europe, and especially of Jews in Poland. That is why we decided not to incorporate the last annex of our gallery which is what the world knew, and this is actually below the liberation of death camps. There is a display devoted to what the world knew, because the world knew but did nothing to stop Shoah. That is why we decided to give it to our colleagues in the Post War gallery rather than present it in our narration.

JM What is the reasoning for the layout of the Holocaust gallery, because it is not completely chronological?

KRM We are telling our story in a chronothematic way, and as you probably realised we are using only sources from the period, and this actually applies to all galleries in our museum, that we are using exclusively testimonies form the period, therefore you will find many different languages because we are always providing so called layer ones ... usually quotations in original languages. And the narration is unfolding, our visitors can observe how the story is being unfolded and we are asking them to suspend their knowledge, their historical knowledge so they wouldn't foreshadow the story we are telling because we wanted to build the story from the perspectives of the people who lived there and then. And our gallery is divided into three chronological axes, and the first would be, first one starts with the beginning of the war, which is September 1st, 1939 and it goes till the end of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. So first we are telling the story of the September campaign, the occupation of Poland, separation and isolation of Jews, then we are entering the story of the Warsaw ghetto. Since we are in the place of the former Warsaw ghetto we wanted to focus on this story, to present more accurately how the life in the ghetto was for the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto. And this leads us upstairs, when we talk about the great deportation action that was in 1942. And then we are ending the story of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, which is the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and the suppression of it in May. So that would be the first storyline. Second part is devoted to the Polish context and it again starts at the beginning of the occupation which is 1939, so when you left there is a part devoted to the Warsaw ghetto uprising you enter this space that is called Aryan street, so this is a space with a street-like display, and I would like to add something here - because you could observe this street from the bridge, and we wanted to convey this message about how life in so-called free aryan Warsaw looked like from the ghetto. That is why we have those panels with projections presenting the idyllic life on the aryan side of Warsaw with summer, people with dogs, strolling with balloons and flowers. But then when you enter the space of the Aryan street itself, you can see that those panels were covering the reality, which was constant terror, suppression, people

104 being punished with death punishment for many different reasons, people struggling for their own lives, organising underground state, and so on so forth. So that was a bit of a digression, so the second chronological line, as I told you starts in 39, and it goes basically till the 1944, because we are presenting first the reality of life in the aryan side, both for Poles and Jews in hiding, and the context of how Jews tried to survive by hiding in forests, or hiding underground and being helped by Poles, or betrayed by Poles, or killed by Poles, or just not being helped at all. So that would be the second chronological line. And the third is again, it starts in 1941, and the beginning of the German march towards Russia. Towards Polish territories previously occupied by USSR, and the Einsatzgruppen, Holocaust by bullets and then we are unveiling the story of the Holocaust itself. Because, we are not using terms Shoah or Holocaust, or even death camps, or gas chambers till the very last moment, you wouldn't find it in the very first parts of our gallery, but only when Jews were sure, were informed about death camps we are telling the story then. So that would be, there were some informations in the Warsaw ghetto, because for instance Shlamek, who escaped from Chmelno death camp, who informed the underground archive in Warsaw, and only then we are informing our visitors. And then this third line, that starts in 1941, ends in 1944 with the last deportees brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau. And the reason why we divided this narration into three parts was because we wanted to present, those are huge problems that we tried to present as clearly as possible, therefore we decided not to only tell the story in terms of chronology because then we would need to make, built many different small paths that would take us from this main narrative line, and therefore we thought that visitors might just get lost in this way of constructing the narration. And those historical thresholds, those three ones, there aren't any clear lines, saying that you are crossing one of the thresholds, this is something we try to convey with use of different media and narration, for instance when you are exciting this narration about Warsaw ghetto uprising and entering Aryan street, you are being informed about it with a quotation telling you about encounters with something usual for Jews who would leave ghettos. They would meet Poles, asking them "are you a Jew?" and being blackmailed by them and also photographs presenting ghetto seeing form the outside, the ghetto burning seeing from the outside. Those photos were taken by Poles, so yeah. Maybe this is also a good place to tell you about the perspectives we are using here, basically we are dividing our narrators according to Hilberg's triad, so usually our main narrators are Jews, as victims of horrors, but these Jewish voices, we are building a polyphony of voices usually. You can see that especially in the display on Czerniaków's suicide, he was the Judenrat leader in 1942, and in this display we are presenting different Jewish approaches and different comments because Jews were not anomaly, they were regular society built out of many different people and many different approaches. So that would be one of the many paths of narration, other would be bystanders, which are Poles and we are saying explicitly that sometimes they were active actors, they did things that harmed Jews, they denounced them, they killed them themselves, but they were also under German terror, and for instance sometimes they remained indifferent to what was happening to Jews because they were fighting, struggling for their own families and they did not have enough space to think about anyone else. And Germans as perpetrators, you could seriously envision almost in terms of different narrative means, because Germans for instance could also make photographs which was very popular then and they were documenting Holocaust by bullets, and we are presenting postcards they were sending to their families, presenting the mass murders in the East. Jewish narration is usually being led by in terms of narration, because Jews couldn't make photographs, but what they could do was to document reality by writing what they saw, what they experienced. And you would see that in several places, for instance Shoah corridor is a good example because two main death camps being presented there is Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka. And of course Auschwitz-Birkenau is like an icon to Shoah, and Treblinka was the place in which all Jews of Warsaw ghetto perished, not all Jews were from Warsaw ghetto, but since we dedicated a big part of the gallery to the Warsaw ghetto we decided to use this camp, and Treblinka is being told from the

105 Jewish perspective. You see many quotations, hand drawings of people who managed to escape and Auschwitz-Birkenau is being told from the German perspective, with photographs, documenting the whole process of people being brought to Birkenau, and quotations of Rudolf, who was the commandant of the camp. So you could see that in some spots we are building the narration in parallel, constructing the Jewish perspective and German perspective, or sometimes Polish perspective and Jewish perspective. And if I may add something about photographs, which is also very important issue in our gallery, the first corridor you are entering about the separation and isolation of Jews from the Polish society, you will see those glass panels on the right with hand- drawings representing different situations and we are providing the original photographs as a footnotes to those drawings, because we are presenting people who are being tormented, tortured, so we decided to present those photographs in their original scale, which is small one. And those drawings as a representation of it, because from our point of view, first violation of those people was the violating act itself, second stage was making a photo, and then blowing up the photographs somehow reenacting this situation in the space of our gallery. Therefore we decided to pay respects to the victims with not blowing up their faces visually.

JM Who did the drawings?

KRM There were two diﬀerent companies responsible for the design of our gallery, ﬁrst .. answering directly your question is a Polish architecture studio Nizio Design International, and they were producing our gallery, preparing all of the drawings, the printouts, so graphics from this studio prepared the drawings according to the photographs we provided.

JM So you commissioned them to make the drawings?

KRM Yes. In our gallery we came up with some of the visual solutions, such as this one, in other galleries, the middle age gallery there were artists involved in the design. But in terms of our gallery it was curators.

JM Could you tell me more about the visual tools that were used in the Holocaust gallery? Could you walk through the decisions for these visual communication tools?

KRM Let me start with the part of the Warsaw ghetto, it was the tilting walls and low ceilings. That was the idea of the team that was developing the design and the ideas behind our gallery at the very beginning, and that was British company Event Communications from London, and they were many people from diﬀerent backgrounds and nationalities and the manager of the company was Steve Simmons, who designed opera and theatre, and you can see that from many moments in the gallery, the space is building emotions. So that was his idea, but as far as I remember the Shoah gallery with the rusty metal .. but since I have just ﬁnished study visits through Polish museums in Gdansk and Gdynia, which are new Polish narrative museums, there is this architectural, there is a trend to use these rusty metals, glass and concrete in really crazy amounts, so maybe this is ... part of the language that is being used to communicate the Holocaust trauma. Because actually we were discussing this as part of an organisation that works on representing 20th century history, and we were talking about the need for another language to convey the story of Shoah, because the one we have has already been used already and sometimes it is annoying. But at the time we were building the museum it was rather fresh, also you need to know that creating a museum was a long process of our museum. Someone made a survey that medium time would be 8 years from the very idea to production, in our museum it was much longer because the idea appeared in 1992 and Event Communications studio started to work on our exhibition without the building in 2002 or 3, and then the opening of the exhibition was in 2014, which makes huge gaps and for instance you could see how the idea of narrative museum is getting old in terms of not using too many objects, in terms of

106 our museum we didn't have any collection at the moment we started to develop the idea, therefore we decided it needs to be narrative museum, but a huge contributor to POLIN museum was Jeshajahu Weinberg, who was the director of the Holocaust museum in USA, and I think he was responsible for the idea of the Yad Vashem exhibition, and he was at the time very into narrative museums, even if he had original objects, he would rather focus on conveying the story by means of narrativization. Since that many years had passed and now we are struggling with visitors saying that there is not enough objects. Especially now there is this turn in museology where you build your narrative with use of original objects rather than multimedia.

JM With the narrative museum I guess another problem is - there is really a lot of information. The Holocaust gallery is the 7th gallery, and I took my time there, but people are just going through since they have taken in so much information already.

KRM So there is an idea, and there is a praxis. So before we opened our museum we were thinking the exhibition will be self-explanatory and also we were aiming our narration for average, 13 ... I mean people in their teens, average Poles for instance in their teens, but as we know it now, the museum voices are rather scholarly, they are not, this is not a language of ordinary teenagers, this is rather scholarly language and now we need to think how to solve it in a way. We divided our narration into several layers, three layers, first would be quotations up to 20 words, second would be longer quotation with some additions of curators and scholars, and third usually museum voice, which is the voice of our scholars and curators. But, as I know, this stratification is invisible for our visitor, and the best way to visit our museum is I guess to have a day, and to start the visit with the audio guide or a tour guide, because it last for two hours, and it is the highlights, like you would see just highlights. And then I guess our visitors should have lunch and then go back to subjects they were interested in but did not have enough time to dive into. But I know the amount of text and information is to die for. Actually at the very beginning, because we have seven galleries, it is 8 in total, but the first one is just a legend, which is an entrance to the rest of the exhibition. Each gallery was developed by usually two scholars and two curators, and during first, actually we started to cooperate between the teams only in the late states of the design, before that it was only professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who was controlling everything to be connected, so at the beginning we thought each gallery would be visited for two hours, and actually we couldn't imagine it differently, but in the end visitors would have 2 hours to visit the whole exhibition, also go to the bathroom and store and that is it. So that is what they would, get just a hint. But I guess it is a rather normal experience in museums, and someone if someone is really interested, he is invited to come back.

JM I would like to ask about the reception of the museum, it has been very well-received in the West with awards, but not as much within Poland as well? It is positive, but according to my research there are some negative responses, like a running headline in a newspaper "Does POLIN propagate hate speech". Why would you say is that?

KRM This article is rather fresh right? Well, yes, starting with good reception, when we opened our museum it was really well received both by foreigners and by Poles, but what happened this year, was this Institute of Polish National Remembrance bill, and it happened in February, this year. And the idea, I do not know what is the idea behind it, because it is very disputable, but probably what our government wanted to gain was to be able to punish people, Holocaust researchers who would suggest that Poles helped Nazis, perpetrators in persecuting Jews or Shoah itself. And it started a huge campaign in Poland, I think it started in January, it is a matter of January of February, and it was somehow fuel for our government and government in Israel, which is also right wing national oriented government. But scholars in Poland are stressed and worried about how future of Polish science will be able to develop, so I mean by this bill I would explain to you this internal Polish

107 current reviews on our museum. Other factor would be that we have opened in March, 8th of March the temporary exhibition devoted to March 1968, which in Poland was anti-Semitic campaign, and we gathered things mainly about the anti-Semitic campaign, after which thousands of Poles of Jewish origin left Poland, as they felt they were being pushed out of Poland, and this exhibition, its last part is devoted to current political language, language of the internal debates of Polish social and political issues, which very much reminds us this language of anti-Semitism and hatred from 68. That is why we are somehow being targeted as anti-Polish institution and some visitors are who are visiting our core exhibition they are saying to our guides "why are you being anti-Polish" or something like that because of those headlines and current debate of us being anti-Polish. But we are in terms of numbers of our visitors, there is a slight shift right now, because over 60% of our visitors were Polish, about 50 something, and 40 something were people from abroad, and right now it is changing, almost 60% are people from abroad. But as a matter of fact, we started equally good, perception by Poles and people from abroad. So it is more a condition of the current political climate.

Appendix 6: Email from Joanna Fikus on POLIN temporary exhibitions

Dear Julja, I apologize I could not meet you but I am glad hearing that meeting with Kamila was productive for you. She as an excellent expert and a very dear colleague too.

Concerning temporary exhibitions at Polin museum: as Kamila probably explained, we are a relatively young institution. Most of our visitors are coming to see the core exhibition as the main attraction (approx. 400 000 visitors visited only core exhibition in 2017). Nevertheless there is a rising group of these who are attending other activities: concerts, temporary exhibitions, workshops, lectures, theatre performances, films, etc. Our goal as the institution is to offer the whole range of different cultural activities addressing different needs.

Exhibitions are the most obvious activity of all museums in the world. Our core exhibition, yet dense, could not deepen all subjects covered there. We are doing it in our temporary exhibition programs, which have two main subjects: historical events or phenomenons universalized and enriched with contemporary contexts and art per se, mainly monographic exhibitions of artists devoted either to their Jewish identity or interest in Jewish topics. Exhibitions are also opportunity to present our collection.

We see rising interest of our visitors in our temporary exhibition program: previous one attracted 44 000 visitors once the current one only for the ﬁrst 1,5 month attracted 25 000. We have 2 exhibitions per year and the process of creating one exhibition takes approx. 2 years. So i.e. for now our temporary exhibition program is set till 2021. We have in-house curators but also are inviting external curators to work for us.

I hope I answered your questions. Wishing you all the best in your future undertakings Joanna Fikus

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