No Shadows No Bodies
Varda Getzow – Andrea Morein – Elsa Pollak (1911–2006)
Exhibition duration: November 22 – December 21, 2024
Vernissage: Thursday, November 23, 6 – 9 p.m
Finissage: Saturday, December 21, 4 – 7 p.m
Opening hours:
Thursday, Friday, Saturday 4 p.m. – 6 p.m.
or by special appointment
Since October 7, 2023, we have been living in a different world in which time and space seem to have dissolved. The value of human life is negotiated in completely new categories. Since then, there have been different categories for 'victims'. The massacred and the hostages on the one hand and the countless dead and injured in Gaza and Beirut on the other. Numbers are added up instead of looking for answers to a peaceful solution.
How do we deal with the pain, the grief, the feelings of guilt, the general uncertainty? These issues are not new and have a long history of injury, loss and trauma in the generations before NOW.
This exhibition does not name any guilty parties and does not position itself explicitly politically; it shows how artists of different generations – first and second generation survivors of the Shoah – create a way to let their experiences speak in pictures through the artistic creation of their experiences.
Varda Getzow's work-titles often carry quotes from poems by Israeli authors such as C. N. Bialik, David Avidan, J. C. Brenner. She thus encodes references to personal themes in poetic images and usually giving titles to her works in the original language of Hebrew, often using landscape designations.
On show in the current exhibition are: Vehashamayim Shamu, 2019, digital photo print – installation view; Now, 2024 drawing on paper; ...und die Akazie blühte, 2019-20, sketches for a sculpture in the Rome ghetto.
Varda Getzow's statement for her participation in the exhibition: 'How can you draw a hole in the heart? Does the street have a memory and what is buried under the river? I try to find an answer, yet am expecting a fiasco'.
Elsa Pollak (1911 – 2006) in her late work, she created large ceramic installations which among others were exhibited at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem. I often visited her in her studio in Herzliya and followed her work-process for the installation 'Kol mah she notar / All that has remained' for which she created a huge mountain made of hundreds of ceramic children's shoes. During one of these visits I was allowed to choose a shoe, which is now part of the exhibition – together with three others examples. Her gift of the child’s shoe always had a special meaning for me... it could have been my shoe had I been born earlier.
Another aspect of this work that moves me deeply is the fact that Elsa Pollak formed the many shoes out of clay and then handed them over to the fire of the kiln. This 'firing' in the kiln naturally evokes gruesome associations, as the mountain of shoes refers to Elsa's experience in Auschwitz. As a survivor, she repeats the burning process as a ritual act, transposing it into an artistic materialization.
Andrea Morein – For many weeks after the massacre on October 7, I was paralyzed. Any contact with images was completely blocked. Suddenly I was a 'stranger' again, it was and is strange to live here at this time and to find a position here with which I could process the events in the Middle East, not to mention the shift to the right in current German society.
Out of this fog came the handling of shards and broken glass in the form of drawings and then a medial approach to what remains unseen. The shard motif itself became an abyss... this time also in a concrete sense, the digital abyss as an artistic setting. Due to the extreme digital processing, the strong erasure and abstraction of all forms, only a few traces remained in the end; a shaky, pixilated line, if one can still speak of lines at all. It is a way of mourning about what cannot be depicted. The three-part work is entitled Lamento 071023.
The project is curated by Andrea Morein
Work list
Varda Getzow
‚Vehashamayim Shamu’, 2019
Installationsansicht, Forum Jacob Pins, Höxter
Nylon Strumpfhosen, verschiedene Möbel, synthetische Haare, Spiegel
Fotografie auf Photorag Papier, 110 x 150 cm
Foto: Varda Getzow
‚Now’, 2024
Zeichnung auf Papier, Stifte und Pastellkreiden, Din A4
‚...und die Akazie blühte’, 2019-20
4 Skizzen für eine Skulptur im Ghetto Rom, Din A4
Andrea Morein
‚Lamento 071023‘, 2024
Dreiteilige Hybridfotografie auf Aludibond kaschiert,
je 80 x 40 cm
Elsa Pollak
Keramikschuhe 1-4
2 Verbrannte Bücher, Keramikobjekte
1 zerbrochene Schrifttafel, Keramik
2 Digitaldrucke: – Details der Installation ‚All that remained‘, je 60 x 45 cm
Foto: Andrea Morein
Biographies
Varda Getzow, born in Jaffa, Israel, has lived and worked in Berlin since 1983.
Her work includes drawings, sculptures and installation. Studied at the Royal Academy The Hague, Holland, at the School for Graphics and the Kalisher School, Tel Aviv, Israel. In 1982 she was the recepient of the scholarship at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France and 1994/5 DAAD grant at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Solo exhibitions include: Plaszow Memorial Museum, Krakow, Poland, 2022; Forum Jacob Pins, Höxter, 2019; Schwerin Cathedral, 2011; House at Kleistpark Berlin, 2008; New Synagogue Berlin, 2001; Group exhibitions include Kolbe Museum, Berlin, 2011; Marco Museo di Arte Contomporanea, Rome, 2006; Petah Tikva Museum, Tel Aviv, 2005; Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 2005. Works in collections including Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Centrum Judaicum New Synagogue, Berlin; Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; British Museum, London.
Elsa Pollak, born in1911, Slovakia; died in Israel in 2006.
Studied art and ceramics in Vienna. In 1944, she was deported with her entire family to Auschwitz and was liberated at Lenzing women’s camp in 1945, Austria. After the end of WWII, she studied with the artist and sculptor Kurt Goebel in Vienna. In 1962, she emigrated to Israel and settled in Herzliya. Elsa Pollak created many monumental ceramic sculptures relating to Auschwitz and the Shoah which are displayed to this day at the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum, North Israel. The shoe installation ‘All that remained…’ was built in 1998 and was on display at Yad Vashem Museum, Jerusalem. In 1991, she received the Sussman Prize for Artists Depicting the Holocaust, awarded by Yad Vashem.
Andrea Morein *1950 Vienna, lives in Berlin
Interdisciplinary artist and curator with a focus on embodied art, collage, photography, gestural drawing. She examines how personal experiences of one's own history can be expanded and embedded into a greater sense of community and historicity. Founding of the project space ODALISQUE, Berlin 2021. Exhibitions include: Axel Obiger, Berlin, 2024; project- space Odalisque, Berlin 2022/23; project-space of the German Artists' Association, Berlin, 2021; Kunstraum 21, Bonn 2016/2013/2010; International Photo Scene, Cologne, 2019; Bauhaus Center, Tel Aviv, 2014; Kibbutz Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2012; Artists' House, Tel Aviv, 2009; Jewish Museum, Vienna, 2008; Museolaboratorio, Citta S’Angelo, Italy, 2005; Goethe Institute Brussels, 2005; artothek Cologne, 2004; Bochum Art Museum, 2003; Women's Museum Bonn, 2002