Art and the Holocaust. Reflections for the Common Future

The project “Art and the Holocaust. Reflections for the Common Future” run by Riga Jewish Community and the museum “Jews in Latvia”, was funded with the support of the European Union under the Programme “Europe for Citizens”

Partners:

International Center for Litvak Photography, Lithuania

Jewish Historical Institute, Poland

The University of Rostock, Germany

The project ran in 2019-2021 and was dedicated to the relationship between art and Holocaust, discussing how the influence of the Holocaust on European society, the world of art and  the artists themselves. Through the prism of art, the project explored how European memory is preserved and developed, what shapes it, and what role the individual in its formation. The aim of the project was to foster discussions about the common cultural milieu in pre-WWII Europe, its legacy today, and new approaches towards commemoration of Europe’s common traumatic past. The project addressed the events of the period between 1938/39 and 1945 – the turning points in European history.

The project included a variety of activities: an academic conference in Riga (July 2019) followed by a collection of articles, two exhibitions of Jewish artists and non-Jewish artists who reflected on Holocaust (one of them virtual and the other in Riga in summer 2020 and in Šiauliai, Lithuania in autumn 2020), and two student forums – in Germany (September 2019) and Lithuania (December 2019).

The student forums were aimed at the students and young adults from Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Germany. Lectures combined with workshops and discussions allowed participants to reflect on issues of Holocaust and art, including: the problem of commemoration, the relationship between individual and collective memory, the importance of active participation in social processes, and the role of art in attempts to develop a common European identity and overcome pan-European traumas.

The art exhibition “Jewish Artists in Pre-War Latvia and Europe: Introduction” took place in Riga, Latvia and Šiauliai, Lithuania in 2020. The exhibition was modelled after a collaborative exhibit that took place in Riga and Liepaja in February 1939 and featured Polish-, Lithuanian-, and Latvian-Jewish artists. The exhibition aimed to invoke the atmosphere of the pre-war Jewish art scene by including the works of those same artists, most of whom perished in the Holocaust, to introduce this forgotten part of Eastern European culture to the large society. Following the project’s conclusion, the exhibition remains on display in various locations around Latvia.

The virtual exhibition “The Riga Ghetto in the Drawings of Aleksandra Beļcova” is available on this website in the “Exhibitions” section, under “Virtual”.