| This web exhibition accompanies the current exhibition Yossi Lemel Poster Art Exhibition at the Gedenkstaette und Museum Sachsenhausen Oranienburg in Oranienburg , Germany (the concentration camp is about 10 km north of Berlin). The opening ceremony is on 14 April at 17.00 . The following text and the reproductions were kindly provided by Yossi Lemel. |
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Here is a description of my exhibition: It consists of ten posters, each
at a size of 1.8 meters X 1.2 meters. Two of them textually describe the
content of the exhibition, in German and English. They tell the story of
the journey of my father from Auschwitz to Sachsenhausen and the fact
that he was used for medical experiments by Nazi doctors.
60 years later I took the role of my father in a "ceremonial way", shaved my hair, wore the striped prisoner's uniform with the number of my father and went back to the same places he was at, in the Krankenbau blocks of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen. This was a metaphoric attempt by me as a representative of the second generation to get "under the skin" of my father as an inmate in those camps. This is the way I chose to show artistically how the trauma passed on to the next generation, which at the same time is taking the duty to carry on the message and the memory of the horrors that happened. The opening poster is a view into the "cupboard of memories", in which my father's striped prisoner's uniform is hanging instead of a regular shirt. The picture was symbolically taken in a hotel room in Berlin. The next pictures are frontal close up son the faces of me and my father, which are the starting point for a journey back in time, to Block 19 in Auschwitz and Block 51 in Sachsenhausen. The technique is using black and white photos of myself which were taken and the actual sites in hundreds of different angles and then multiplied by the computer. This creates a special effect of hyperrealistic panoramas of the reality of a "prisoner of the past". |
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Pictures from the opening of the exhibition:
Yossi Lemel and Juergen Doering, curator of the poster collection at the Museum fuer Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg (DE) |
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