Displaced persons

>> Memories and Testimonies is a moving depiction of the ripple effects of war

by GENEVIEVE PAIEMENT

Considering its subject matter (“the experience and personal impact of war and displacement, as witnessed first hand or as told by the children of immigrants”), Memories and Testimonies might easily have been an all-together dismal exercise. But despite its depressing raison d’être, the exhibit is a moving must-see.

“It’s important to note that these works are not depressing—well, some of them are,” says Concordia art history professor Dr. Lorne Lerner, curator of the exhibit, which will be going to Ottawa, Toronto and St. John’s, Newfoundland, after its stint in Montreal. “But there is an ethical, moral message, and they are significant works.” Lerner specializes in artists who have immigrated to Canada and whose work addresses the effects of war, genocide and displacement. “From WWII, to the present day, the tensions and conflicts that caused that war are still with us,” Lerner muses. The featured artists come from different parts of Europe—Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Bosnia—and from different generations.
The drawings by the late Polish Holocaust survivor Gershon Iskowitz, who became a renowned Canadian abstract expressionist painter, have not been seen by the public in over 20 years. “He created two of these drawings at night and hid them beneath the floorboards in the Buchenwald camp,” Lerner explains. “He felt he had to provide a record of the horrors that he saw around him.”

Equally moving are the contemporary, colourful and disturbing paintings by Ukrainian-American Natalka Husar, commenting on the corruption, pollution and poverty in her parents’ homeland. British artist Angela Grossman’s painting-collages similarly hearken back to a homeland she never knew: pre-WWII Germany, which her father, a Kindertransport child, found too painful to ever reminisce about. Grossman’s imagined kin take the form of nude beauties beside whom 1930s memorabilia is pasted, creating an eerie, nostalgic patchwork effect.

Then there are the sculpture and drawings by Tunisian-born Georges Dyens, made in reaction to having experienced the Nazi invasion and American bombing of his homeland, and forced involvement by the French in the Franco-Algerian war. Dyens eventually left France, feeling overwhelmed by what he saw as insidious, unspoken racism. “It’s so ironic,” Lerner says, “because they have LePen in France today, so everything that was is still the same.” :

Memories and Testimonies at Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery until May 18