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 Otto Dix 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 Max Beckmann’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 (Paris: 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, Wuppertal, 2018); S. Kangisser, D. J. Nowak, eds., The Cold Shower of a New Life: The Post-War Diaries of a Child Survivor (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 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 Modern Art, 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, Israel 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 Israel Museum, 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 the Holocaust 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 printmaking, 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