Arts of witness or Awkward objects? Vernacular art as a source base for ‘bystander’ Holocaust memory in Poland

Figure 1 from: Janus A, Sendyka R (2021) Depth of the field. Bystanders’ art, forensic art practice and non-sites of memory. International Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 73-83. https://doi.org/10.3897/hmc.1.63264

“…In many ways, the contemporary work of intervention into the circumstances of abandoned and dispersed sites of violence is a particular kind of "bystander art". We would like to understand it -based on the evidence presented above -as a variant of the "art of witness" (Lehrer and Sendyka 2019): characterized by a conscious motivation to testify about a past crime or act of violation of human rights and clearly communicating this through artistic means. In the same way, images -examples of which are discussed above -are a unique and rich testimonial resource.…”

Testimoniality: A lexicon of witnesses of Holocaust non-sites of memory in Poland

“…It is an awkward object (cf. Lehrer and Sendyka 2019), requiring a proliferation of codes and clarifications, but precisely because of this awkwardness the whole communicates the overriding duty of testimony.…”

Figure 1 from: Muchowski J (2021) Vernacular historical practices on Holocaust non-sites of memory in Poland. International Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 37-44. https://doi.org/10.3897/hmc.1.63351

“…Two different kinds of knowledge have grown up in parallel -professional and local. This division is connected to the conviction of professional historians that local historians -like local artisans (Lehrer, Sendyka 2019) -are incompetent and their work of little value according to the yardsticks of professional discourse (Wiszewski 2008;Smasonowicz 1987). In a rare case of a professional historian even referring to vernacular historical writing, Bartłomiej Krupa read over a hundred books on the history of local Jewish communities in Poland and stated that this writing was subjected to unchanging rules since the 1980s, when it emerged as an articulation of -on the one hand -a surge of interest in the history of Polish-Jewish relations after the release of Claude Lanzmann's movie Shoah; on the other -the career of "small homelands" literature celebrating the imaginary multiculturalism of old Poland.…”