19 October 2023

Opening of the exhibition "Materializing. Contemporary Art and the Shoah in Poland" at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum in Munich

The official opening of the exhibition "Materializing. Contemporary Art and the Shoah in Poland" took place at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum in Munich. The show explores how contemporary Polish artists engage with the subject of the Holocaust. Works made in a range of media — from installation, through painting, to video and photography — filled four floors of the museum's modern building on Max-Mannheimer-Platz. The exhibition is moving and demands reflection. Its central idea is to give shape to the emptiness left by the Shoah — an emptiness that is hard to fill, hard to examine and hard to describe. Art dealing with the Holocaust confronts history and speaks about it in many ways and on many levels. For the exhibition's organisers, the key question was how to define that emptiness, and how it materializes — in this case, in contemporary art. The titular "materializing" therefore appears in different contexts. Sometimes it is a story about Warsaw and the material void left by the Warsaw Ghetto, now increasingly filled by high-rises and buildings put up by developers. Sometimes it refers to deeply personal histories of specific individuals, and through these personal stories, materializing in art, it speaks of the dramas of war. Paweł Kowalewski's works belong in exactly this context. The series "Strength and Beauty. A Very Subjective History of Polish Mothers" is a set of large-format portraits of women of Jewish descent who lived through the Second World War. From the works, beautiful, gently smiling women look straight into our eyes. At the moment the photographs were taken they were young and full of joy. They had dreams and plans for the future, destroyed by war and by the rise of two totalitarian regimes. They carried traumas that stayed with them for life. And yet they raised their children, their sons, without hatred. They gave them love and goodness, which overcame evil. That symbolic victory is embodied, too, in their enormous portraits hanging in the very place where Nazism was born. "This is a project about women, and about the strength of the women thanks to whom the world survived. Raped, abused, wounded, maimed — they had every reason to pass the pain of memory onward, yet they nurtured within themselves a seed of kindness and love. Despite traumatic experiences they became tender, good mothers, wives, lovers. Some were heroines of the barricades, others heroines of everyday life, who survived and returned to ordinary normality," says Paweł Kowalewski.