Migration, Memory and the Visual Arts: Second-Generation (Jewish) Artists

7 May 2021, University of Leicester Online symposium

Organisers: Dr Imogen Wiltshire and Dr Fransiska Louwagie

Keynote: Dr Glenn Sujo (author and curator of Legacies of Silence: The Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory, Imperial War Museum) Young Blood and the Exterminatory Idea: A Continuum?

Abstract As we draw on the survivors’ unassailable witness, can we as artists and scholars also look ahead to a concentrationary imaginary that enlarges the field of representation as a locus of possibility, resisting invisibility? And following from Adorno’s paradoxical proposition, can we still affirm that it is indeed ‘only in art that the enormity of such suffering finds a voice’? In this vein, I ask whether the universal message contained in the graphic cycles of Francisco Goya, Käthe Kollwitz or portend a visual imaginary of terror for the modern era that foreshadows the totalitarian and genocidal impulse to the destruction of a people. How do these images implicate (Rothberg) or make us complicitous (Sontag, Brink) in acts of violence, then and after? What obligations do they bestow on future acts of transmission, poetic misprision or an aesthetic of resistance?

Two works, one a foreshadowing from the narrow corridor of exile and clandestinity in ’s Bird’s Hell (1938), the other, a fictional if also factual account of internment in KZ Auschwitz by Tadeusz Borowski (1946), sharpen our response to the subject’s radical and creative as well as destructive and nihilistic potential. Taking a cue from the symposium’s title, we might question whether the assumed model of generational succession — by choice, familial descent, identification with communal or ritual practices of remembrance or artistic affiliation — remains a viable frame for transmission in the enduring imaginary of human suffering, when subject to the erosions of time and memory as well as communal breakdown. In a postscript, I offer glimpses of my own immersion in and poetic misprision of an imaginary of terror with a focus on the naked human as the unremitting referent of extremity and suffering, resisting abstraction and invisibility while rendering visible a ‘radical nakedness’ (Des Pres) and casting bold projections into the future.

Biography Glenn Sujo is a visual artist, educator, author and curator with an interest in the expressive, analytical and imaginative tools of drawing on the margins and in extremis. Curatorial projects include: On the Track of Tyranny, Wiener Library, London (1983); Drawing on these Shores, A View of British Drawing and its Affinities (1993-94); Artists Witness the Shoah, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield (1995); Legacies of Silence: The Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory, Imperial War Museum, London (2001); Migrations of Drawing (in preparation). He is a contributing author to: Richard I. Cohen, Laurence Sigal-Klagsbald, Le Juif Errant, Un Témoin Du Temps (: Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme, 2001); Last Expressions: Art from Auschwitz (Chicago: Northwestern University, 2002); Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, eds., Concentrationary Memories (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012); Antje Birthälmer, Gerhard Finckh, eds., Jankel Adler und die Avantgarde: Chagall, Dix, Klee, Picasso (Von der Heydt Museum, , 2018); S. Kangisser, D. J. Nowak, eds., The Cold Shower of a New Life: The Post-War Diaries of a Child Survivor (: , September 2019).

Since his first solo touring exhibition in Britain, Histories at Arnolfini, Bristol, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool and Museum of , Oxford in 1982/3, Sujo has exhibited widely, most recently in: A Cabinet of Drawings, University of Northumbria Art Gallery, Newcastle and Lines of Enquiry: thinking through drawing, Kettles Yard, University of Cambridge (2006); Lifelines, Works on Paper, Lewis Elton Gallery, University of Surrey (2013); Anatomies, Eton College and Royal Collections Trust, Windsor (2014); Bodyscapes, Museum, Jerusalem (2020). His works have been acquired by The British Museum, Imperial War Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum and University College Collections, London; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Metropolitan Museum of Art and Jewish Museum, New York; The , Jerusalem and Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas.

Respondent, Monica Bohm-Duchen (Insiders/Outsiders Festival)

Biography Monica Bohm-Duchen is the Creative Director (and initiator) of the Insiders Outsiders Festival. She is an independent London-based art historian with a longstanding interest in the relationship of art to war, trauma, displacement and cultural cross-fertilisation. The institutions for which she has worked include Tate, the National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, Sotheby’s Institute of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art. In the mid-1980s she acted as researcher and co-curator for a pioneering exhibition (held first in Berlin and then at the Camden Arts Centre) entitled Art in Exile in Great Britain 1933-1945. Her many publications include After Auschwitz: Responses to in Contemporary Art (1995 – contributing editor) and Art and the Second World War (2013); and at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is Associate Lecturer, she recently introduced a course entitled The Immigrant Experience in Modern British Art.

Panel 1: Second-Generation Artists in Search of their Roots

Rachel Dickson (Ben Uri Museum and Gallery) ‘In and out of each other’s worlds’: The Art of Helga Michie and Ruth Rix

Abstract Months before the death of Austrian émigré, Helga Michie (1921-2018), ‘I am Beginning to Want What I am’ Helga Michie Works 1968-1985 (Vienna: Schlebrügge.Editor, 2018) was published, an elegant introduction to her biography and largely unknown mid-life artistic practice, in a compendium rich with literary contributions. Focussing on Helga's drawing and , it analysed the iconography of trauma, loss and identity, which courses through her work, rejecting a strictly linear chronology in favour of something more fragmentary, inevitably encouraging a re/kindling of critical interest. The literary slant was particularly apt, given that Helga was identical twin to Ilse Aichinger, renowned Austrian poet, and author of Holocaust novel Die Grössere Hoffnung - but only one Mischling (half-Jew) twin had the means to escape after the Anschluss. Thus Helga began a new adult life in London, via a kindertransport in July 1939, welcomed into a cultured refugee milieu. Encouraged by émigré sculptor Bettina Adler, wife of Holocaust historian H G Adler, and by Ilse, towards creating something personal, Helga commenced her own art, privately, in the early 1960s, subsequently studying printmaking at the City Lit and Morley College, London.

Whereas Helga’s art has recently been discussed through the prism of twin-ship and Aichinger’s writing (Ivanovic, Sprachkunst Jahrgang XLIX/2018 2, September 2019; IMLR conference, January 2020), this paper, drawing on private archives, reappraises it within the context of the art of her daughter, painter Ruth Rix (b. 1942). Across two generations of creativity and a range of media, the art of mother and daughter - under the shadow of the Holocaust - is discussed: how each influenced

2 the other, and how commonalities and differences run through both. As Ruth suggests, Helga provided a ‘doorway’ into Austria, and Ruth, conversely, one to Englishness, though both strayed constantly into each other’s worlds. Shared motifs underpin shared concerns: fracture, family, memory, identity, notions of home, creating a trans-generational body of work which together is even more powerful than when viewed separately.

Biography Rachel Dickson (MA Courtauld) is Senior Research Manager, Ben Uri Research Unit, formerly Head of Curatorial Services, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2011-2020). Her research focusses on émigré artists and designers in Britain, particularly from the two principal waves of Jewish migration, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Committee member, Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, London University, she was contributing co-editor, Yearbook Vol. 19: The Applied Arts in British Exile from 1933 (Brill, 2019) and has contributed 'Ben Uri Art Society and Music in Exile 1931-1960’ to Yearbook Vol. 22 (2021). Recent conference papers have explored émigré art historians, J P Hodin and Helen Rosenau, and émigré artists, Werner Jackson and Helga Michie. Recent publications include a chapter in Internment in Britain in 1940: Life and Art Behind the Wire (Valentine Mitchell, 2020); ‘Mapping Finchleystrasse: Mitteleuropa in North West London’ (co-authored with Sarah MacDougall) in Arrival Cities: Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the 20th Century (University of Leuven, 2020) and ‘"Our horizon is the barbed wire": Artistic Life in the British Internment Camps' in Insiders Outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Visual Culture (Lund Humphries, 2019). She recently curated Ben Uri's online exhibition Midnight's Family: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain (2020) and is contributing editor for From Adler to Zulawski: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain (BURU, 2020).

Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg (Yad Vashem) In Search of a Lost Childhood: Holocaust, Memory and Filiation in Sigalit Landau’s Works

Abstract Sigalit Landau (b. 1969) is known for her video works, installations and sculptures exhibited in leading museums around the world. While the Salt Works series created in the Dead Sea, or Barbed Hula, where she performs spinning a barbed wire hoop around her hips, have won international acclaim for their powerful imagery and originality, their connection to the Holocaust has been overseen. In this paper my aim is to shed light on the presence of the Holocaust in her work and specifically explore a less known series of works crucial in order to understand this Israeli artist’s artwork as part of the second-generation experience.

Born to a father who is a Holocaust survivor, and being the granddaughter of Viennese refugees who fled to on her mother side, the Holocaust had a significant impact on Sigalit Landau’s identity. Representing her father Frederick as a young boy and the special friendship that he developed with a dog during his internment in a camp in Transnistria, the sculpture Father and Tufik (2014) attempts to capture the innocence of the little boy before his childhood was destroyed. What began as a very personal and intimate work evolved into a series of large-sized sculptures dealing with the complex relationship between the artist and her father, ultimately raising questions about suffering and the artist’s self.

Biography Eliad Moreh-Rosenberg is Curator and Director of the Art Department in Yad Vashem’s Museums Division. Born in Paris, she studied Art History and English Literature, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Museum Studies at the Tel-Aviv University. Before joining Yad Vashem’s Museums' Division in 2003, she was a researcher and lecturer at the Hebrew University’s Center for Jewish Art. She conducted research on the School of Paris and on artists such as Bruno Schulz, Felix Nussbaum

3 or Charlotte Salomon. Her exhibitions in Yad Vashem include Last Portrait: Painting for Posterity (2012) which was accompanied by a catalogue she authored, The Anguish of Liberation as Reflected in Art: 1945-1947. In January 2016, she curated the exhibition Art from the Holocaust: 100 Works from the Yad Vashem Collection at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin which was accompanied by a catalogue she co-edited. In April 2019, she curated “New on Display” in the Yad Vashem Art Museum exhibiting artworks created during the time of the Holocaust that had never been before shown to the public. She is currently conducting research about the diaries’ sketches of survivor and artist Yehuda Bacon.

Panel 2: Art-Making, Process and Identity

Judy Goldhill and Fay Ballard (artists) Inner Recreation: Psychoanalysis and Second-Generation Visual Arts

Abstract This paper will examine the link between the need for reparation and the origin of the creative impulse, looking at psychoanalytic ideas on creativity. It will take as its case study two second generation artist-daughters who collaborate, Judy Goldhill, brought up by parents and relatives affected by the Holocaust; Fay Ballard, whose father was placed in a Japanese internment camp during World War Two.

In ‘Dream, Phantasy and Art’, Hanna Segal builds on Melanie Klein’s ideas on the infantile depressive position and the need for reparation, by stating that art is a search for symbolic expression. The creation of this inner world is unconsciously a recreation of a lost world: what has been lost can be regained. Segal believes that art which moves us contains both death and life. Donald Winnicott writes on play and creativity. This paper will explore these ideas in the work of these two artists.

As young children, Judy’s parents both escaped Nazi Germany in 1937/8 and settled in England. Her family lost members in the Holocaust. Judy’s father died of polio when she was a baby. Fay’s father was born in Shanghai in 1930 and interned in Lunghua camp from 1943 to 1945 before coming to England. These experiences were internalised and recreated in his novels. Fay’s mother died when she was seven.

A collaboration between Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill has led to exhibitions, ‘Breathe’ at Freud Museum (2018) and ‘Travelling Companions’ at Cambridge University (2020-21). Drawing on family experiences and archives, they explore memory and identity, death, loss, and mourning. They also examine the emotional charge of ‘home’ and personal belongings, as well as the companionship of the skies.

Biographies Fay Ballard read History of Art at University of Sussex (1976-9) and worked at Royal Academy of Arts and Tate. She completed a MA Fine Arts at Central Saint Martin’s (2004). After her father’s death in 2009, Fay explored her childhood growing up as a motherless daughter in a series of drawings informed by psychoanalysis which were exhibited in London and Leeds. She was visiting artist at Hammersmith Hospital (2017-18) and sits on the Imperial Health Arts committee delivering arts programmes to patients across five London hospitals. Her practice includes field trips to record flora growing in specific locations, most recently in Transylvania for The Prince’s Foundation. Fay speaks at art schools including Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon. Her work is held by HM The Queen, HRH The Prince of Wales, The Prince’s Foundation, Imperial Health, Royal College of Physicians, Winsor & Newton and Murray Edwards College Cambridge.

4 Judy Goldhill completed both her BA and MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. She worked as picture editor on the British Journal of Photography and co-editor of Creative Camera, followed by freelancing as a portrait photographer for international magazines and newspapers, as well as corporate work. She exhibited her work A British Portrait: Photographs of The Anglo/Jewish Community at the Jewish Museum in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and Camden Arts Centre.

She has had four artist’s residencies in Astronomy and Physics in North and South America and UCL. She exhibits her photographs and short films, as well as producing artist’s books, which have been acquired by major international collections. She won The Birgid Skiold Award for Excellence at the London Artist’s Book Fair held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. All her books have been acquired by the British Library for their emerging European Artists collection. She is currently working on a commission by the University of Bristol for an artist’s book on Dante.

Lorna Brunstein (artist) and Katie O’Brien (artist and Director of 44AD Artspace, Bath) Inherited Trauma, Place, Embodied Memory and Artistic Practice - Conversation

Abstract Lorna Brunstein’s creative practice attends to the impact of inherited Holocaust trauma and embodied memory. Drawing on her life experience as the child of Holocaust survivors, visiting sites of memory and working with fragments of testimony, she creates spaces in which to reflect on themes of identity, loss, displacement, home and exile.

Artist and curator Katie O’Brien has supported and presented Lorna’s work following an early encounter with the installation, So How Come I got It Then? (2006). This piece, drawing on Lorna’s treatment for breast cancer, was framed around her father’s assertion that ‘there is no cancer in this family’. The installation set out themes, motifs and materials that continue to resonate in Lorna’s work.

Lorna seeks to immerse herself in the matter and fabric of memory as a direct way of engaging with an intimate and overwhelming knowledge of the Holocaust. Her artwork offers an emergent articulation of the complex ways in which trauma is carried through generations as embodied knowledge. The conversation will explore Lorna’s creative exploration of a childhood where the Holocaust was ‘in my mother’s milk’ and manifested as a teenager in her father’s particular anxiety for her safety. Objects, snapshots, family catchphrases, refrains of a lullaby become transformative, defining moments opening a window into embodied memory.

Lorna’s creative practice is becoming more visceral and performative, using soil she gathered retracing the route of a death march her mother survived (The Earth Beneath Our Feet, 2017) and at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp where her grandmother was killed (After Auschwitz 2019). With both parents now deceased, and the first generation of Holocaust survivors dwindling, recent work is driven by an even greater imperative to find ways of telling her story and its wider impact. In the context of mounting hostility towards migrants and refugees, Lorna’s work has an urgent contemporary relevance.

Biographies Lorna Brunstein studied Fine Art at Aberystwyth University in the 1970s, she worked in the Arts and Education for much of her career often at the expense of attending to her own practice. Unable to approach the subject of the Holocaust in her creative work until aged nearly 50, she was offered an opportunity to participate in an exhibition in France exploring ideas around ‘memories of a place I once inhabited’ (1999). Producing work for this exhibition was the stimulus for an unfolding creative

5 practice exploring her family history and its impact on her. She works primarily in mixed media installation describing the process as an ‘emotional archaeology in which traces, fragments and memories are the starting points.’ Lorna’s work has been exhibited widely; most recently (After Auschwitz, 2019) she presented a solo installation near her childhood home in Whitechapel, the place where she believes her ‘inherited trauma’ began. In the last few years, a dynamic collaborative practice has emerged with her partner, walking artist, Richard White. Their latest project, ‘Sara’s Last Steps’, a commission from the Lake District Holocaust Centre, is currently on hold due to the pandemic. Lorna lives and works in the South West; she is an associate artist at 44AD Artspace, Bath.

Katie O’Brien is an artist, curator and project director of 44AD Artspace. She studied Fine Art at Bath School of Art and Design, Bath Spa University, and graduated in 2012. Responding to a shortage of affordable studio and gallery space for emerging artists in Bath, Katie set up a community art space. 44AD is now well established, with a strong track record as a dynamic gallery supporting artists’ studios and a programme of community driven art exhibitions unique in the area. As well as making her own work, which she exhibits regularly, Katie has also taught painting and collaborated with City of Bath College in running a successful curatorial course. Katie first hosted Lorna’s work at 44AD 7 years ago and they have worked together on many other exhibitions since, including Forced Walks: Honouring Esther (2015-2017), a project in which Katie was also an active participant.

Monica Petzal (artist) Memory, Time and Printmaking

Abstract In this presentation I will look at ideas of layering and ‘the time it all takes’ as an essential component of research and the way it is entwined with the process of making prints.

My work is about layers and fragmentation, literally and metaphorically, a slow accumulation in every way. All the processes affect the content. I start with narratives, many A4 folders of long gathered ideas and precious archive. Next to the flatbed scanner and Photoshop, as each ‘folder’ slowly shifts from being a plastic envelope to a manipulated, multi layered computer file. The completed ‘flattened’ file is commercially processed into a full-size transparency.

I pin a transparency on the wall in front of me. Using an empty metal plate and thinned down oil- based inks, I make, like painting, monoprints to relate to the transparency, using it as a guide to, texture and shapes. My offset press has a large rubber roller which holds a ‘ghost’ image. Like the layers in Photoshop, each monoprint goes through the press many times, building subtle layers of colour and texture.

I make the top layer plates in my darkroom, using a commercially pre-sensitised plate. I place the transparency over it, expose it to a pre-tested amount of UV light and wash with a chemical developer which reveals the image. Now ready to use, the top print layer is printed on top of the monoprint with transparent black ink.

Printmaking is old slow technology and I have to allow a long and methodical hour at the end of each day to clean up. There is time throughout these processes to shift and change the work.

Biography I was born three weeks after the Coronation, to German-Jewish refugee parents, and grew up in North West London. After studying painting at Kingston, I took an MA in Art History at Sussex under Norbert Lynton, and then went to the Royal College of Art, Painting School in 1978, under the

6 formidable Peter de Francia. I emerged at 28; an artist, an art critic and shortly afterwards a university lecturer, the latter two, to make a living.

By 1992, three children later, and horrified at the status of women artists (including myself), I co- founded The Foundation for Women’s Art. FWA was a charity aimed at increasing public knowledge and understanding of women artists through exhibitions. By the time it closed in 2006, I felt the issues had moved on.

In between, I had become fascinated by print and in 1999 went to Camberwell School of Art to take a 2-year MA in printmaking. I started to show my work more widely, and have it collected by museums and kind individuals. I selected, spoke about, wrote about and curated print exhibitions; including co curating ‘Process and Innovation, British Printmaking Japan’ at the Kyoto Museum.

I started a gallery in 2006. Printroom (www.printroom.studio). My interest in family stories is long standing, and for some years I did life story interviews for the British Library, including with some exceptional individuals: Annely Juda, Norbert Lynton, John Kasmin and Leslie Waddington. Increasingly I focussed on my own family and their complicated and often untold stories, though I was too late to record them in person. In 2013 I went to work in the city print studio in Dresden. These prints became ‘Indelible Marks: the Dresden Project’, shown in 2014 at the Kreuzkirche Gallery in Dresden, Germany for the 70th commemoration of the bombing, and at the Herbert Museum, Coventry, UK in 2015 -2016 for the 75th commemoration of that bombing. I also made a large print installation for Coventry Cathedral.

I am the Vice Chair of the Dresden Trust, a charity that works on reconciliation between Britain and Saxony. In 2013, after the referendum on membership of the EU was announced, I applied for, and got, my German citizenship; I hope more as a symbolic gesture than anything I will ever need to use.

Panel 3: Memory Projects

Dr Maarten van der Heijden (JOMA, Amsterdam) The Jewish Second-Generation Art & Family Museum Amsterdam (JOMA): A Personal and Collective Memory Project

Abstract This paper will present the JOMA, a second-generation art and family museum. The JOMA is an artwork in progress, beautifully located at the Brouwersgracht 49 in the heart of the monumental 17th century canal belt in the centre of Amsterdam. It combines the visual art of (Dr.) Maarten van der Heijden (1947) with his family stories of the Holocaust. There is also a learning and education centre, a sculpture garden and a museum café. The museum also shows Maarten’s blue glass collection. The paper will present Maarten’s background and his links as a second-generation artist to notions such as art and postmemory. It will also discuss the aims of the museum more broadly and the role of art in second-generation memory and/or Holocaust commemoration today.

Biography Maarten van der Heijden was born in 1947 and belongs to the so-called Jewish second generation. His grandfather Martin Spanjaard, a musical director, was murdered in Auschwitz. After a career as musician and child psychologist Maarten studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Art Academy Amsterdam, where he graduated in 2010 with photocollages that reflecting his Jewish second-generation identity. Exploring his Jewish roots has made him discover both the beauty of the Talmud and Jewish mysticism and the horror of the Shoah. JOMA website.

7 Dr Alexandra Karl Portrait Pebbles: A Holocaust Education Project for Middle Schoolers and Beyond

Abstract I am the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. I was born in 1969 in Oxford, but my father was born in 1937 in Hungary. Only 15 of his 85 extended family members survived the Holocaust. While I grew up with little knowledge of this history, I found myself many years later living in the American West where I began to unpack my Jewish ancestry. I was struck by how little was known about the Holocaust and, working as an art teacher, I became intrigued by the challenge of teaching the Shoah to young children. In 2010, I created ‘Portrait Pebbles.’ It was very simple, used humble materials and was not too traumatic. Its goal was to create a space for students to reflect on those who perished, and to help young Americans imagine the victims as real people. On a technical level, the project combines the basics of portraiture with a commonplace river pebble; the resulting object can be placed anywhere in a classroom to form an impromptu memorial. From 2010 to 2016, I facilitated this project in various classroom settings around Salt Lake City. For the conference, I will give a brief introduction and do a demonstration. Website: www.portraitpebbles.com

Biography Alexandra Karl is a critic, curator and educator. She trained as an art historian, first in Munich (MA) where she worked as an Assistant Curator at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus. She then moved to Cambridge (Ph.D) and wrote a dissertation about 'Darwinism in German-speaking Artists from the 19thCentury.' In 2001, she moved to the American West and began writing critically about contemporary Utah artists. She is a member of AICA-USA, the professional association for art critics and has taught at the University of Utah and at Utah Valley University. Last year, she curated an exhibition which examined the role of distortion and reflective surfaces in the work of ten Utah artists. In January 2021, her show 'Wildfires: in Utah Art, Homes and Lands' will be exhibited at the Bountiful Davis Art Center. Her publications and projects can be found on her website: https://www.alexandra-karl.com

Panel 4: (Re)creating Narratives between History and Memory

Betsy Inlow (University of Leicester) Visual Narratives of Identity: The Creative Process of Third-Generation Comic Artist Miriam Libicki

Abstract As Holocaust survivors continue to grow older, research into innovative ways to combat historical distancing within Holocaust memory becomes increasingly important. The collaborative, inter- disciplinary project Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education seeks to bridge the gap between survivors and those of later generations via graphic novels. Miriam Libicki, a third-generation American-Israeli comic artist, currently works with the project to create a graphic novel about the life of Holocaust survivor David Schaeffer. Autobiography and extreme self- reflection on her own and others’ Jewish identity are recurring subjects in Libicki’s artistic works, as can be seen in her comic book Jobnik! and her newest work Toward a Hot Jew, a collection of journalism-like illustrated short essays. Libicki’s work hypothesizes on the complex and ever- changing status of Jewishness as an identity, from the fetishization of the Israeli soldier to the racial experiences of Ethiopian Israelis. In a meta-narrative, Miriam situates her own art within the tradition of previous Jewish artists such as Philip Roth, Justin Green, and Harvey Pekar. Libicki self- describes her artistic genre as gonzo literary comics, a genre which by nature involves the inclusion of the artist’s identity and its expression as a connection to larger cultural contexts. As such, Libicki and her work is an ideal subject for research into the construction of identity within artwork and its

8 potential direction for the future. By means of a qualitative interview, this paper explores how the concept of identity, both personal and collective, has influenced Libicki’s creative process when generating initial drafts of her graphic novel about a non-relative, first-generation survivor. It seeks to discover how, in Libicki’s experience, the exploration of identity within art, perhaps particularly graphic novels, can help to forge connections in a time of expanding historical distance in Holocaust testimony.

Biography Betsy Inlow is a History PhD student within the University of Leicester’s Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She has a varied academic background including BA degrees in Anthropology and Classical Civilizations: Art and Archaeology from Indiana University and an MSc in Museum Studies from the University of Glasgow. She has worked in several museums, including the Mathers Museum of World Cultures, the American Academy in Rome, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Tall Ship at Riverside, and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Museum. Her doctoral research is looking into the ways in which graphic novels and other forms of non-traditional media surrounding the Holocaust can be used by museums, memorials, and schools to enhance their Holocaust and human rights education programmes. She is currently working as a research assistant for the project Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education, a collaborative, inter-disciplinary project through which three graphic novelists team up with four survivors to create graphic novels about the survivors’ experiences of the Holocaust. This is how Betsy met Miriam Libicki, one of the graphic novelists working on the project. Betsy’s own artistic endeavours include ceramics, drawing, and origami.

Joel J. Cahen Maps, Models, Memory: Second-Generation Art in the Netherlands

Abstract I will focus on how remembrance of the Shoah permeates art and culture in the Netherlands, examining how this subject evolved from being rarely, or only implicitly, discussed to receiving daily attention in the media. A specific artwork I will discuss here is the Monument of Gratitude, first designed by Jaap Kaas and eventually by Johan G Wertheim, which forms a remarkable beginning of this journey through Dutch memory. As a second-generation survivor, I remain amazed to see how the memory of the Shoah continuously moves survivors, their children, their grandchildren to do something with this haunting memory.

In this context I will focus on three artists, Bart Domburg, Gerd Jan Kocken and Jules Schelvis, all active in the last 25 years. Kocken’s work on Holocaust and Second World War remembrance focuses on the maps and geography of Amsterdam, as well as cities in and Germany, taking as a starting point the so-called ‘Stippenkaart’ of the municipality of Amsterdam, which was made for the Nazis and showed the exact spreading of Jews over the city of Amsterdam. Domburg’s approach to memory involves documenting on huge scrolls of paper all the names and addresses of Jews in Amsterdam and the Netherlands, an artwork which is now in the collection of the National Holocaust Museum. In another work, he also reproduced several chapters of Victor Klemperers autobiography. Jules Schelvis is a survivor whose work is partly based on memory and partly on historical research: if not a work of fine art, his model of Sobibor is in any case the work of a gifted, driven craftsman. I will compare Schelvis’s model to the work of a second-generation artist and daughter of another Sobibor survivor of the uprising in the same camp, Berish Freiberg, the Israeli ceramist Yael Atzmony.

9 Biography Joel J. Cahen (1948) is historian and Yiddish linguist. He studied at the Amsterdam University (1978) and at the Max Weinreich Center for Advanced Jewish Studies of YIVO in New York. Cahen was the General Director of the Jewish Historical Museum (JCK) in Amsterdam from 2002 until 2016. In 2008, Cahen incorporated the Portuguese Synagogue into the Jewish Cultural Quarter and, in 2013, he initiated the National Holocaust Museum.

Prior to this, he was Chief Curator and Deputy Director General of Beth Hatefutsoth, the Museum of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv (1990-2002) and Curator for History at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam (JHM) (1982-1990). He was also Archivist at the Municipal Archives of The Hague for the Ashkenazic Jewish Archives and a Fellow of the Getty Leadership Institute (1990).

Cahen currently runs a consultancy for museums, working with, for example, the Groningen Museum, the former Hachshara in Wieringen and the Bario di Arte, Willemstad, Curaçao. He is working on a biography of Jacob of Mozes Lopes Quiros and the tensions between tradition and secularism in the nineteenth century. He is preparing, with Ronit Eden, an exhibition In Between Worlds, Chagall and Contemporary Artists at the KRONA Museum in Uden, Netherlands.

Event Support This event is generously supported by the Association for Art History (AAH), Cultural Literacy Everywhere (CLE), the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the School of Arts at the University of Leicester. The symposium is open to all and free to attend.

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