Materialising: Contemporary Art and the Shoah in Poland

The exhibition Materialising: Contemporary Art and the Shoah in Poland examines the artistic practices of contemporary Polish artists who deal with memories and the material traces of the Holocaust in their work. The Shoah has been present in Polish visual culture since the 1940s - initially in films, paintings, graphic works and sculptures, and increasingly today in research-based installations, videos and performances. The works are the result of different creative approaches - they are documentation, commemoration, and expressions of grief and anger; there are also works that focus on rituals, or that look at politicised representations of events and individuals and manipulations of collective memory.

The artists Zuzanna Hertzberg, Paweł Kowalewski, Agnieszka Mastalerz, Natalia Romik, Wilhelm Sasnal, and Zofia Wiślicka-Żmijewski & Artur Żmijewski are dedicated to the multitude of gaps and voids, both material and immaterial, created by the loss of almost the entire Jewish population of Poland. The title of the exhibition refers to the confrontation with the little material evidence of the crimes committed in the past - the remnants of singular lives that cannot be lived and revived again and their identification.

Last edited on 21.05.2025