In the exhibition, Revenants, empty shrouds of draped cloth, appear as ghosts of the dead. Family Portraits, taken from photographs of the days when the family's life was normal co-exist with the Revenants. The German audience was confronted with the story of my Jewish family that had lived in their midst. My intention was to reclaim a part of my history, memorialize those who died, and return to the Bambergers a piece of their history. I hoped to reach the German citizens of Bamberg, and, later, American audiences, with images of normalcy that they could accept and through which they might understand a single strand of the Holocaust. Central to this installation is the Document Wall - a set of 66 facsimiles of documents that tell of my family's emigration attempts, accompanied by a taped narrative. Two large, hanging Garments made of stiffened cloth evoke memories of those who died. The wall of Tablets holds transferred images of the various eras of this story. The images struggle for clarity, like memory itself. |