The exhibition Atoms and Void should be understood primarily as an artistic research project, which brings to the fore a problematic episode from recent Romanian history. This episode, namely Romania’s participation in the Holocaust, is quasi-absent in the public memory and under-represented at the level of local public debates. As the title suggests, my artistic approach is predicated on the idea that any attempt at historical reconstruction must incorporate a sense of rupture. Our knowledge of the past is interspersed with absences and omissions and one could argue, following in Walter Benjamin’s footsteps, that the vanishing point of history should not be sought in a distant past, but rather in the present.
The concept of postmemory was an important theoretical landmark for my research, one which governed the genesis of the exhibition. The act of remembering has been persistently examined with the awareness that it was ab initio bound to fail. Fragmentary testimonies notwithstanding, the traumatic events of the Holocaust are impossible to comprehend or recreate. As a matter of consequence, the artistic approach emphasizes the problem of non-representability and mobilizes a performative dimension. This dimension is singularly able to achieve a connection with the past through an imaginative effort of recontextualization. The recontextualization of the Holocaust ultimately feeds into a process of reconfiguration of the subjective identity.
The historical episodes relevant to this research were: the Dorohoi Pogrom (1 iulie 1940), the București Pogrom (21-23 ianuarie 1941), the Iaşi Pogrom (27-29 iunie 1941) and „the death trains”.
The works were exhibited in June 2010: Galeria Posibilă and Foto Anexa (Bucharest).
