MATTHEW KROUSE
The exhibition asks its rhetorical question – where is Kovno? – in the present tense. This nifty device brings what was once a proper geographical location into a 21st century consciousness.
By asking where the place stands today, we are forced to consider what might have transpired there, had the Holocaust not happened. We are made to wonder what has been retained in the minds of our community, and in the minds of Lithuanians who choose to revisit their history.
Where Kovno was, is not where Kaunas is now. Although Jews once called the city by its Yiddish name, the exhibition highlights the fact that remembrance of Jewish life that once thrived there, is lacking. There were approximately 40 000 Jews living in the area on the eve of the war.
In the research phase of the work, Walt travelled to Lithuania to try to understand the landscape of lost Jewish life, of Jewish deaths, and the Lithuanian response to the mass killings that happened early on in the war.
The research trip happened as a result of a commission by the Kaunas Textile Biennale for an installation in 2009. Walt had first gone to present work there in 2007 and, in preparation for the next edition, presented a proposal that, she says, “they thought was far too historical – it was not an artist’s proposal”.
However, overcoming this hurdle meant that she now had a commission. At a Lithuanian workshop for research into the use of archives by artists, she confronted participants with the absence of Jewish memorialisation in present-day Kaunas. “I just felt the absence of this community so profoundly from the moment I landed in Lithuania.
“I started looking for the Jews. Where are they? How come there’s no narrative? There are no plaques, there is nothing – it was gone.”
In turn, she was confronted by a fellow artist who asked: “What does an artist do if they are shocked and angry? Now go back to South Africa, and come back in two years’ time and do a project. And that’s what I did.”
A further research trip happened and writer Alice Kentridge went along. In an essay introduction to the project, in the exhibition catalogue, Kentridge writes: “To go back was to be confronted with the absence, the violent absence of Jewish life that had so filled the streets.”
Filling the exhibition space, however, has meant that Walt and Rumbak have taken the archive of Jewish memory – and we all have something of Lithuanian Jewish life within us – and placed it inside the gallery.
Artistically, Where is Kovno? is an exhibition of printed artwork on fabric. There are linocut prints of artefacts of Jewish life from the pre- and Holocaust era, as well as prints of Jewish buildings that have survived the decades in dereliction.
A “Kaddish Space” is animated by a soundscape composed by renowned composer Philip Miller. It is encircled by printed drapes containing the memorial prayer as well as Yiddish letters. At the centre is a telephone book from Kovno that once listed Jewish names and addresses active on the eve of the annihilation.
On the sides of the exhibition are fabric maps of Lithuania showing the size of the Jewish population at the height of the Jewish existence there, as well as the sites of mass murders.
A small, walled-off section contains a photograph by David Goldblatt of a simple gravestone in the forest of Popolan, marking a massacre. Both he and Walt share family roots in that very town.
In a recorded response to his journey Goldblatt wonders aloud about whether the Holocaust experience has meant that Jews are above racism.
In recorded testimony, a survivor of the Kovno Ghetto, Irena Veisaite, asks Walt how many South Africans would have been prepared to shelter an African child under apartheid, had the lives of their children been threatened by such action.
These are questions possibly not intended to be answered directly, but to be used as the basis of introspection. They further the theme of silence.
“The elements of the installation, serve as a response to those silences,” Kentridge writes. “In the work, there is the desire to show, to record, to map, to make visible. And then an attempt to make a way towards feeling, holding, and mourning.”
* Where is Kovno? is showing at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre until November 12. www.jhbholocaust.co.za
