Memory in the Present Tense: Vera Frenkel’s Diaspora Art

Abstract

AbstractVera Frenkel’s video and installation work focuses on the complexities of intercultural relations and identities, always raising issues of uncertainty, fantasy, and cultural expectations. Born in Bratislava in 1938, carried by her mother out of Europe on the eve of war, Frenkel came to Canada as a teenager, studied sociology at McGill University, and turned to art to explore the passages and perplexities of Canadian diasporic life. While there is little that is insistently Jewish in her art, the work draws unmistakeably on modern Jewish experience, and extends its impact to a wider, multi-cultural world.My paper focuses on four works. With a ground-breaking use of internet technology, String Games (1974) plays on the game of Cat’s Cradle to link disparate and distant communities. …from the Transit Bar (1992–) constructs a train station bar as a site of social and political flight, with Yiddish prominent among a babble of languages. Body Missing (1993), an interactive internet site, continues the journey—as viewers follow clues in pursuit of the Shoah’s ‘missing bodies.’ The recent video installation Blue Train (2014) again invokes flight and promise, melding danger and opportunity. With Jewish history and experience a recurrent theme, Frenkel’s art explores the pressures of and pleasures in Canada’s cultural mosaic.