GHOSTS: FRENCH HOLOCAUST CHILDREN
by HIRSCH PROJECTS
Allentown - PA —Martin Art Gallery at Muhlenberg College is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition Ghosts: French Holocaust Children, an installation of sculptural and photographic work by Hirsch Projects. The exhibition takes place October 2 - November 13, 2016 in the Baker Galleria, with an opening reception scheduled for Wednesday, October 5th from 5-6:30pm. A public talk with the artist will be Wednesday October 19 at 5:00pm, in the Recital Hall in the Baker Center for the Arts at Muhlenberg College.
Ghosts: French Holocaust Children is a three-dimensional installation that acts as an ethereal commemoration to these children’s abbreviated lives. This project is based on documents and photographs collected by author, lawyer, and Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld that have been reinterpreted and presented in the form of three 1/5-scale boxcars containing over 600 expressionistic portraits of these deported children plus a series of mural sized individual portraits.
During World War II, over 11,000 Jewish children were deported from France to Nazi death camps. These children were among more than 75,000 French Jews deported under the Nazi plan for the “Final Solution to the Jewish question.” Of those French Jews transported, only 2,564 survived the Shoah. At most 300 of these Jewish children survived.
Ghosts’ post-documentary approach transforms archival material by blending outer and inner realities to construct a historic media narrative that examines the extreme boundaries of human behavior regarding anti-Semitism, identity, loss, and memory, and racism, conveying a haunting sense of lost human possibilities.
