Images of displaced memories: documentation, intervention, and the ethics and aesthetics of seeing

Abstract

This article considers the works of Polish artist Łukasz Baksik and Israeli artist Simcha Shirman, both of whom used photographic practices to address memory and displacement through depicting graves and gravestones. Baksik's most prominent project, titled Macewy Codziennego Użytku [Matzevot for Everyday Use] (matzevot is Hebrew for ‘gravestones’) documents and brings home a socially and politically fraught phenomenon by which Jewish gravestones are plundered or misappropriated from cemeteries in Poland, and transformed into everyday uses such as building materials or working tools. From Shirman's wide-ranging oeuvre, I discuss a series of photographs depicting graves and gravestones, taken at Muslim cemeteries in Acre – a city where his parents, both Holocaust survivors, settled after World War II. It is argued that despite lacking visual or formal resemblances, both projects − through interventions in the sensible and memory − resonate in shared consciousness towards contemporary global issues such as diaspora, homeland, and nationality. Not only do both projects illuminate how contemporary art elaborates forms of memory, identity, and production of historical knowledge, but they also reveal a paradigmatic shift from the deconstruction of past narratives to imagining political and ideological alternatives, serving inter alia as a means of rectification and healing.