To Paint A Testimony - Sexual Violence in Women Holocaust Survivors' Paintings, April 2016, The City University of New York. (original) (raw)

Drawn out of Horror: Graphic Narratives Created by Jewish Women during the Holocaust PROOF

The Story's Not Over: Jewish Women and Embodied Selfhood in Graphic Narratives, ed. Victoria Aarons, 2025

This essay examines five handmade albums created by German, Slovakian and Polish Jewish women who took up graphic storytelling in the French internment camp of Gurs (1941-2), the Lviv ghetto (1942), Theresienstadt (1942-1943), and the Auschwitz subcamp of Rasko (1944). These graphic narratives created by Jewish women can prompt us to think about how the history of Jewish female experience and artmaking during the Holocaust might be rewritten differently.

Art after atrocity: post-Holocaust representation and affect

2019

The thesis investigates how to effectively address (through visual art) events of war and traumatic memory, with particular focus on the Holocaust and its subsequent visual representation. Through critical analysis and interviews with artists, theorists, historians, philosophers, writers and curators as well as the studio-based outcomes: the research creates a detailed analysis of traumatic, memory based visual representation and effective memorialization, and its purpose in contemporary society. The PhD advances the role, positioning and association of memory within the representation of horrific experience, and how this affects the creation, presentation and affecting qualities of art based on perpetrated atrocities and near incomprehensible human experience (Art After Atrocity). Accompanying the written research is a single, large-scale artwork produced in parallel to the written research. This artwork, Deathgate, consists of an individually handmade ceramic 'stone' for e...

Beyond Survival: Navigating Women’s Personal Narratives of Sexual Violence in the Holocaust

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Gender Research, 2019

During the Holocaust and the subsequent process of what has become known as liberation, women constantly confronted convergent oppressive forces. Under the Nazi regime and its cohorts as well as during the liberation process, Jews faced torture and genocide. Jewish women constantly lived with an additional layer of oppression: threatened or actual sexual violence. Positioned at the vortex of intersecting oppressions, how can the identities of these women transcend their stature as victims? How do women creatively reposition themselves vis-à-vis the perpetrators and the traumatic events so they can maintain or reclaim their agency and dignity? Centering on narrative analysis of first-person testimony gleaned from memoirs and from the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA), this investigation covers four narratively sustained modes of comportment toward sexual violence. First, mutual aid demonstrates an ethic of care. Second, degrading or minimizing the perpetrator or the sexual act retains the narrator’s dignity. The final two angles offer complementary ways to avoid or repel assault: distracting an assailant by directing him toward more attractive targets, and rendering oneself repellant. Departing from the prevailing approach of treating Holocaust survivor testimonies primarily as responses to trauma, this project reveals how the narrators actively craft their identities through the storytelling process. This creative molding of identity through narrative, a process called autopoeisis, recasts survivors of these and other traumas as dynamically (re)negotiating their understanding of self and their relationship to lived experiences. Trauma stories thereby further tikkun olam—repair of a fractured world.

Provoking Taboos: Representing Holocaust Art Today

KULT_online 28 (2011)

Since the mid-1990s, representations of the Holocaust in the visual arts, literature, and popular culture have undergone a paradigm shift, becoming both more transgressive and more scandalous. How and why should artistic and cultural representations of the Holocaust arouse today precisely the kind of emotional provocation that is peculiar to its subject matter? These are the main questions that the artist testimonies and scholarly essays collected by Sophia Komor and Susanne Rohr in The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo: Transatlantic Exchanges on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation, invite their readers to grapple with—in utterly engaging and thought-provoking ways.

The Holocaust and the Arts: Paths and Crossroads

Art in Hungary 1956–1980: Doublespeak and Beyond, 2018

The study provides the first comprehensive survey of the reception of the Holocaust in Hungarian art in the 1960s-1970s. Conclusion From the late 1950s onwards, the topic of the Holocaust had a significant reception in Hungarian art. Besides the artists discussed here, who returned to the subject several times, others also touched upon the topic in singular works. Additionally, there were state commissions, but it seems that the independently produced works and the commissioned ones resulted in developments unfolding in parallel, mostly disconnected from one another. This was due to the fact that the non-commissioned artists’ perspective was typically very different from that of official memory politics, which focused on the anti-fascist struggle and thereby instrumentalized the memory of the Holocaust, as exemplified here by the Mauthausen case study. The examples analysed here also shed light on differences in approach between periods and generations. Artists of the older generation, still temporally close to the traumatic experiences, used a surrealist, symbolic approach from the late 1950s; the primary objective of their works was the commemoration of the victims. Accordingly, they employed a Holocaust iconography referring to the locations and tools of the genocide, and symbols alluding to the victims and their memory. By contrast, a more open representation and a critical approach became prevalent in the mid-1960s, and particularly at the end of the decade; besides remembering, identifying those responsible for the Holocaust and the reasons behind it gained importance, which were frequently connected to present-day problems, such as contemporary anti-Semitism. This tendency was partly due to the fresh approach of the younger generation emerging at this time, but also influenced by the conceptual turn of the late 1960s, which brought new forms of expression. For example, the inclusion of texts helped foster a new, more open tone. It is also important to consider, besides the generational differences, the artists’ personalities, e.g. the works of Endre Bálint and János Major have significant affinities due to their satirical tone despite any differences in generation or genre. The 1960s and 1970s were characterized not only by the coexistence of generations and styles but also by a kind of thematic plurality in the works. In a number of cases the theme of the Holocaust surfaced in connection with further topics, thus visualizing different time periods simultaneously. The two possible perspectives on the Holocaust – social and individual – often appeared together, most notably in the works based on well-known documentary photographs but also recounting personal stories. These simultaneously reflect two tendencies that characterize further works as well: the generalization of the experiences of the Holocaust and personalization through emphasizing aspects of the event related to individuals or families. A number of works link the Holocaust and the Nazi era to contemporary anti-Semitism and to events such as the Six-Day War. These works represent the Holocaust as part of a broader narrative of anti-Semitism running from the past to the present. Another important characteristic of the period was the indirect articulation of messages that were nevertheless quite accessible to contemporaries. Such works leave it to the viewer to complement and interpret the visual representation by ‘reading between the lines’. A characteristic example of this elliptical mode of expression is János Major’s photograph of a gravestone marked ‘…ER ADOLF’, referencing Hitler. The use of biblical and historical allusions also belongs to this tendency. In these cases, the remote event is not used primarily to illustrate something about itself, but as a reference to the Holocaust: for instance, works dealing with the late nineteenth-century blood-libel case of Tiszaeszlár do not simply present an interesting historical episode, but use it as a parable to address the Holocaust and issues from the artists’ own era. A significant number of the works discussed here were shown to a Hungarian and (primarily in the case of conceptual works) international audience at the time of their production or a few years later. Even so, the public display of works was restricted: the works of neo-avant-garde artists, for example, often reached only a narrow subcultural audience, regardless of their topic. Despite occasional, temporary access to most of these works, no broad public discourse about the Shoah emerged during this period, and this lack of discourse was not exclusively the result of the socialist system in Hungary. In fact, such a discourse would have been anachronistic as it would have occurred before the memory of the Holocaust became globalized and the term Holocaust was widely established. The works discussed here are exceptionally significant for the very reason that (in time and in critical attitude) they were ahead of the prevailing social discourse, or – as seen in the case of the Roma Holocaust – even ahead of scholarly research on the subject.

Post-Holocaust Art and Post-Memory Art: A Reevaluation

Art of the Holocaust until 1989: Beyond an East/West Divide - Central Europe University, Budapest, 2022

A renewed attention has been paid after 1989 to the relationships between art and the Holocaust. This renewal might be enlightened by the questions and issues artworks made before 1989 raised in their time, and more specifically thanks to those which were produced in the direct aftermath of the Holocaust. In this regard, throughout this paper, post-Holocaust art will designate artworks and artefacts made by people who were active during and after the Holocaust, most of them with an experience of it, whether it has been direct or not. Postmemory art thus refers to an art whose authors did not experience this period of time, since they belong to the second or third generation. This distance allowed them to consider the situation with different eyes, maybe more theoretical ones. Notwithstanding, my main hypothesis is that a limited but highly significant number of issues post-memory art raised were already present, somehow in nuce, in post-Holocaust artworks. This is why those deserve a reevaluation, both as testimonial and artistic propositions. A rapid survey of the last four decades bibliography can help us to draw a state of the arts, and to understand the ongoing evolution of the successive perspectives in which relations between arts and the Holocaust art have been regarded.

Reflections on Art and Genocide

Violated: Women in Holocaust and Genocide, 2018

Chapter in the catalogue for the exhibition "Violated: Women in Holocaust and Genocide," presented at Ronald Feldman Gallery, May 12 - April 12, 2018.