Manfred Bockelmann. Drawing against Oblivion

23.05.2019 - 15.06.2019

Austrian Cultural Forum, New York / United States

The Austrian Cultural Forum New York is pleased to present the special exhibition Drawing Against Oblivion in the framework of the Austrian Commemoration Year 2018. From May 23 to June 15, Austrian artist Manfred Bockelmann shows a selection of his large-scale portraits of children and adolescents who fell victim to Nazi terror. With these works, Bockelmann seeks to create "signposts against forgetting." He desires to "give faces to at least a few names and numbers, lifting a few individuals out of the anonymity of statistics...."

Bockelmann deliberately chose simple materials for this project, opting for charcoal on jute canvases. The portraits are based on police shots taken by Nazi authorities, some of the children were already wearing the infamous broad-striped convict's suits and had their heads shaven. Whereas the photographs meant to show "the others" and were taken to emphasize their dissimilarity, Bockelmann's charcoal drawings point to the "sameness" in the depicted children and the beholder. The artist aims to make viewers aware of their own humanity, not only with respect to the past, but also to the present. The expressions of the depicted young people strike a chord with the visitors standing in front of the drawings. They evoke a sense of kinship, even of identity, which forms the essential basis of human ethics.

A continuous loop screening of Bockelmann's film Nachtfahrt (AT, 2013) is part of the exhibition. In a nightly drive through Vienna, Bockelmann projected his large-scale charcoal drawings onto the facades of houses. The depicted children and adolescents were mostly expelled from their homes at night.

[Quelle: www.acfny.org]