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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 185 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 185, April 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
After Auschwitz, now at London’s Royal Festival Hall, is the first exhibition in Britain to focus on contemporary artists’ responses to the Holocaust. The title is taken from the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno’s claim, in 1949, that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Artist Zoran Music survived the war in Dachau and is a non-Jew who was incarcerated for his resistance activities. His work, We are not the Last is a powerful statement outlining the importance of fighting this barbarity. The most impressive work is that of the American born Shimon Attie who with The Writing on the Wall projects eight black and white photographs of pre-war German-Jewish street life (1920–1933) onto the very geographical location where the original photographs were taken. These transparencies, which marry contemporary Berlin with the ghosts of the murdered population, are haunting yet breathtaking and form a lasting impression.
After Auschwitz is an interesting exhibition and although it misses a valuable opportunity to illustrate the heroic resistance to the Holocaust, it is moving in parts and yet remains unsentimental – choosing to avoid many of the widely used visual images of death camps. Most of the work in the exhibition has been produced in the last ten years – proof that in a world still witnessing anti-Semitism and racism, the Holocaust has lost none of its relevance.
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