Antiquarium
INSTALLATION · 2025 · AT HOME GALLERY, SLOVAKIA
An installation of video, objects, photographic works in a former synagogue in Slovakia. The work deals with the cultural amnesia and the residual scars of the past in a region that has seen a great deal of conflict.
This work was installed in the beautiful At Home Gallery, a former synagogue built in 1912 that has seen a lot of painful history. On the mezzanine were two videos largely of the wastelands of Chernobyl, while lining the walls were images based on old photographs that I had collected in Budapest during my exhibition there in 2001. Down the centre were pairs of ballet shoes of various colours filled with stones and sprinkled with turmeric, as if they came from some fairytale now forgotten. The shoes met the visitor on entry and then faded into the distance. The photographs were blown up and colourised and in duplicate. One series was overlaid with text from the Hungarian novelist Imre Kertész, an Auschwitz survivor and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize. The words are extracted from his moving novella, Kaddisch for a Child Not Born, in German (I read him in the German and he eventually settled in Berlin, and his German publishers were his supporters for the prize). The exhibition can be interpreted in several ways. One motivation for me is just how quickly people are willing to forget the lessons of the past and hurtle into the future with a lack of humility.
