International audience ; Since 1800s, numerous wars have impacted the cities of Iran. Regarding the urban artwork in Tehran, the capital of Iran, the following question comes to mind: What approach has the urban artwork adopted to represent the war and its related concepts? Adopting a documentary research approach and investigating the concept of war in different eras, this paper attempts to study the sculptures in urban spaces as documents. Based on the books and historical documents, a total of 192 sculptures, which were built from the Qajar dynasty to 2016 have been examined in this study. During the Qajar dynasty, the governments have used sculptures, especially the ones placed in city squares, to demonstrate their power. After the Constitutional Revolution, figures denoting concepts of justice and freedom became pervasive in the squares up until the end of the Pahlavi dynasty. After the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war has been called Sacred Defense and the goal of creating statues has been changed to express revolutionary and ideological concepts. Figurative sculptures and busts have been made as a tribute to the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war. KEYWORDS Sculpture | Urban art | War | Urban space | Tehran
International audience ; Since 1800s, numerous wars have impacted the cities of Iran. Regarding the urban artwork in Tehran, the capital of Iran, the following question comes to mind: What approach has the urban artwork adopted to represent the war and its related concepts? Adopting a documentary research approach and investigating the concept of war in different eras, this paper attempts to study the sculptures in urban spaces as documents. Based on the books and historical documents, a total of 192 sculptures, which were built from the Qajar dynasty to 2016 have been examined in this study. During the Qajar dynasty, the governments have used sculptures, especially the ones placed in city squares, to demonstrate their power. After the Constitutional Revolution, figures denoting concepts of justice and freedom became pervasive in the squares up until the end of the Pahlavi dynasty. After the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war has been called Sacred Defense and the goal of creating statues has been changed to express revolutionary and ideological concepts. Figurative sculptures and busts have been made as a tribute to the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war. KEYWORDS Sculpture | Urban art | War | Urban space | Tehran
International audience ; Since 1800s, numerous wars have impacted the cities of Iran. Regarding the urban artwork in Tehran, the capital of Iran, the following question comes to mind: What approach has the urban artwork adopted to represent the war and its related concepts? Adopting a documentary research approach and investigating the concept of war in different eras, this paper attempts to study the sculptures in urban spaces as documents. Based on the books and historical documents, a total of 192 sculptures, which were built from the Qajar dynasty to 2016 have been examined in this study. During the Qajar dynasty, the governments have used sculptures, especially the ones placed in city squares, to demonstrate their power. After the Constitutional Revolution, figures denoting concepts of justice and freedom became pervasive in the squares up until the end of the Pahlavi dynasty. After the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war has been called Sacred Defense and the goal of creating statues has been changed to express revolutionary and ideological concepts. Figurative sculptures and busts have been made as a tribute to the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war. KEYWORDS Sculpture | Urban art | War | Urban space | Tehran
International audience ; Since 1800s, numerous wars have impacted the cities of Iran. Regarding the urban artwork in Tehran, the capital of Iran, the following question comes to mind: What approach has the urban artwork adopted to represent the war and its related concepts? Adopting a documentary research approach and investigating the concept of war in different eras, this paper attempts to study the sculptures in urban spaces as documents. Based on the books and historical documents, a total of 192 sculptures, which were built from the Qajar dynasty to 2016 have been examined in this study. During the Qajar dynasty, the governments have used sculptures, especially the ones placed in city squares, to demonstrate their power. After the Constitutional Revolution, figures denoting concepts of justice and freedom became pervasive in the squares up until the end of the Pahlavi dynasty. After the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war has been called Sacred Defense and the goal of creating statues has been changed to express revolutionary and ideological concepts. Figurative sculptures and busts have been made as a tribute to the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war. KEYWORDS Sculpture | Urban art | War | Urban space | Tehran
Can reenactments be a way to create counter-narratives in and for the museum? Through the analysis of political performance (or what the artist Tania Bruguera calls 'political-timing-specific' artworks), this essay discusses the potential of reenactment as both a practice of materializing memories and narratives of oppression and of rethinking museum policies in terms of preservation and display. Its main argument is that, while the archive can be regarded as a form of materializing the memory of these works, reenactment is more than a way of recovering the past; it is also a device for reconstructing memories of activism and oppression. This essay further suggests that reenactments of political-timing-specific works demand a change in accessioning, conservation, and presentation practices, which might be inclined to erase decentralized art-historical and material narratives.
"The Statue Must Be Removed!": The Memorialization of Daniel Webster and the Great Northern Compromisers, 1853-Present Michael Larmann University of Montana, History Department, Doctoral Student 860-235-7881 | michael.larmann@umontana.edu The removal of statues has become a controversial topic in American society over the course of the past decade.Although statues of Confederate figures in the South have attracted the most attention in recent years, in the mid-nineteenth century, statues of Northern "compromisers"—those who sanctioned slavery rather than joining the abolitionist cause—also created controversy. Northern politicians such as Daniel Webster and President Millard Fillmore are two such figures who are historically notorious for supporting the Compromise of 1850, which postponed sectional hostilities, but also perpetuated chattel slavery and promoted slave catching in the United States for another decade. This research project analyzes the statues and memorialization of such Northern compromisers from the mid-nineteenth century up until today. It furthermore contributes to emerging scholarship on statues, nineteenth-century American history, and the creation of memory. Daniel Webster will serve as the focus of this project, since the erection of his statue in Boston, Massachusetts in 1859 started one of the first controversies in the United States about memorializing compromise. Through the use of memorial committee records, abolitionist newspapers, petitions, correspondence, broadsheets, and speeches, this project will analyze the controversy of memorializing Daniel Webster, the Massachusetts senator who infamously supported the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. This project also analyzes how academics and the American public has since remembered Webster, Fillmore, and similar northern compromisers up until the present by looking at the erection of later statues and analyzing bibliographies. Popular culture sources that featured Daniel Webster's image including theatre productions, movies, and non-academic books will help determine how the American public has remembered Webster since the nineteenth century, if they do at all. The final portion of this project discusses where historic actors such as Webster fit into today's debates on memorializing controversial figures. The goal of this project is to understand how the American public has memorialized northern compromisers over time and where they sit with us today. Additionally, this research emphasizes the politics and power dimensions involved in building statues in the nineteenth century. The Webster statue in particular was the work of the private and wealthy Boston Brahmin elite class. A discussion about statues is also a story about the groups that erected them and the environments in which they are built. Therefore, this project also explains the processes and importance through which people engraved statues and memorials into the physical landscape and material environment of the American metropolis in the nineteenth century. This research on the Daniel Webster statue and the image of the Northern compromiser reveals that criticisms and debates about removing and building statues temporally go back to the mid-nineteenth century. This past decade in our nation's history was not the first time that citizens have debated memorializing controversial individuals. Members of the American public were debating the meanings of memorialization and statues longer ago than previously believed.
On 8 September 1968, Ryszard Siwiec set fi re to himself during a harvest festival in the 10th Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw. Through his self-immolation, he sought to protest against Communist rule in general and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in particular. However, his death did not gain wider attention. Further protests 'by fi re' took place in the subsequent months and years in East Central Europe. Among them was the self-immolation by the Czech student Jan Palach in Prague. In contrast to Siwiec, this young man was immediately recognized as a martyr in Czechoslovakia as well as on the other side of the Iron Curtain. It was only after 1989 that Ryszard Siwiec's story became increasingly well-known. Today, his act still remains in the shadow of Palach's, however. This article deals with the marginal position of Siwiec in the Polish national pantheon. By reflecting on the various constraints on creating martyrs in state and post-socialism, it focuses on one particular aspect of Polish and Czech – or rather Polish-Czech – memory politics. As for the 'Polish Palach' Ryszard Siwiec, the paper demonstrates that Czechs have played a crucial role in popularizing him.
On 8 September 1968, Ryszard Siwiec set fi re to himself during a harvest festival in the 10th Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw. Through his self-immolation, he sought to protest against Communist rule in general and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in particular. However, his death did not gain wider attention. Further protests 'by fi re' took place in the subsequent months and years in East Central Europe. Among them was the self-immolation by the Czech student Jan Palach in Prague. In contrast to Siwiec, this young man was immediately recognized as a martyr in Czechoslovakia as well as on the other side of the Iron Curtain. It was only after 1989 that Ryszard Siwiec's story became increasingly well-known. Today, his act still remains in the shadow of Palach's, however. This article deals with the marginal position of Siwiec in the Polish national pantheon. By reflecting on the various constraints on creating martyrs in state and post-socialism, it focuses on one particular aspect of Polish and Czech – or rather Polish-Czech – memory politics. As for the 'Polish Palach' Ryszard Siwiec, the paper demonstrates that Czechs have played a crucial role in popularizing him.
Abstract This article is a critical reading of Mimmo Paladino's 'Gateway to Lampedusa/Gateway to Europe', a memorial built in Lampedusa to honour the lives of thousands of immigrants who died trying to reach Italian shores. It considers how the monument's ambiguous representation of migrants reveals the deeply contradictory position of Italy towards the mass immigration it has experienced in recent years, and it contextualizes the creation of the memorial in 2008, the year Berlusconi's third government began. The close analysis of Paladino's bas-reliefs illustrates the iconographic reification of old colonial stereotypes that essentialize and dehumanize the immigrants in order to separate them from the supposedly superior Italians. Ultimately, the article argues that the Gateway to Lampedusa reflects an ideal vision of Italy that is rhetorically crafted to support a culturally and racially pure image of the country. Thus the representation of immigrants is intrinsically tied to Italy's process of self-definition that both accepts and rejects aspects of the historical past in order to maintain a self-image grounded in cultural and social heterogeneity.
Summary. The purpose of this research is to present on the basis of archival sources, memoirs, and oral history testimonies the history of the largest transit prison in post-war Ukraine, to study the memory and the state of its memorialization in Lviv urban space. The scientific novelty of the article implies that for the first time different aspects of the prison are revealed in Ukrainian historiography. They include, in particular, the penitentiary regime and space, the composition of the prisoner contingent, resistance and escapes from the prison, the operation of the transit point, as well as conditions of the transportation of convicts to GULAG camps. Conclusions. Transit prison № 25 in Lviv was one of the central cites of Soviet mass violence in Lviv and the largest institution of such type in the Ukrainian SSR. Through its example one can realize how Nazi and Soviet violence intersected in an urban space where both systems often used the same premises and objects to isolate their victims. For many thousands of prisoners, the Lviv transit prison became an intermediate station/a transit point on the way from pre-trial detention to GULAG camps. It also served as a meeting point for inmates from Western Ukraine and Central Eastern European countries occupied by the Red Army. At different times, criminal and political prisoners, foremost members of the Ukrainian and Polish underground, were kept here. Despite conflicting political views, it was the pursuance of common interests of survival and resistance against the brutality of the prison administration and criminals that drew Ukrainian and Polish political prisoners together behind bars. Families of those repressed, including women and children, even babies, were kept in prison. This fact highlights "the family hostage taking" practice used by Soviet authorities against "enemies of the people" in Stalin՚s period. Between 1949 and 1950, the prison in parallel served as an integral part of the Soviet infrastructure of mass deportations, which affected families of members and sympathisers of the Ukrainian nationalist underground, wealthy farmers, and Greek-Catholic clergy in Western Ukraine. Due to the lack of documentary sources, it is nowadays impossible to establish even an approximate number of people who passed through the Lviv transit prison. The inmates՚ memory of their prison experience is ambiguous. Some recall the transit prison as a site of endless suffering and destitute, while others describe it as "the less evil" and some relief in comparison with pre-trial detention facilities run by the NKVD-MGB. Proper memorization of the site of the former transit prison in Lviv urban space has just started. This task is being performed by the Memorial Museum of "Territory of Terror", which has been created in this place. ; Анотація. Мета дослідження – на основі архівних документів, спогадів і матеріалів усної історії представити історію найбільшої пересильної тюрми на території України у повоєнний період, проаналізувати пам՚ять про неї і стан меморіалізації у міському просторі Львова. Наукова новизна полягає у тому, що вперше в історіографії розкриті різні аспекти функціонування тюрми, зокрема тюремний режим і простір, склад в՚язничного контингенту, спротив і втечі в՚язнів із тюрми, діяльність пересильного пункту, умови етапування засуджених до таборів ГУЛАГу. Висновки. Пересильна тюрма № 25 (1944–1955) була одним із центральних місць радянського масового насильства у Львові та найбільшою установою такого типу у повоєнний період в УРСР. На її прикладі можна простежити, як у міському просторі перетиналися нацистське і радянське насильства, адже обидва режими часто використовували ті самі приміщення та об՚єкти для примусової ізоляції жертв. Для багатьох тисяч в՚язнів львівська пересильна тюрма стала проміжною ланкою/транзитним пунктом на шляху між слідчими тюрмами й таборами ГУЛАГу. Вона була також місцем зустрічі людей із Західної України та зайнятих Червоною армією країн Центрально-Східної Європи. У різний період тут утримували як кримінальних, так і політичних в՚язнів, передусім учасників українського та польського підпілля. Попри різні політичні переконання, за колючим дротом останніх об՚єднували спільні інтереси виживання та протидії сваволі тюремного керівництва і кримінальників. У стінах в՚язниці утримувалися також сім՚ї репресованих – найчастіше жінки та діти, навіть немовлята. Це було прикладом «сімейного заручництва», яке широко практикувалося радянською владою щодо «ворогів народу» у сталінський період. У 1949–1950 рр. пересильна тюрма паралельно була частиною радянської інфраструктури масових депортацій, які охопили родини членів і симпатиків підпілля ОУН, заможних селян та греко-католицьке духовенство із Західної України. З огляду на брак архівних джерел, на сьогодні неможливо встановити хоча б приблизну кількість людей, які пройшли через львівську «пересилку». Пам՚ять в՚язнів про свій досвід перебування у тюрмі вирізняється строкатістю. Одні згадують про неї як про місце суцільних страждань і поневірянь, інші – як про «менше зло» і певне полегшення у порівнянні зі слідчими тюрмами НКВС-МДБ. Належна меморіалізація території колишньої тюрми у міському просторі Львова тільки розпочинається, чим опікується Меморіальний музей «Територія терору», створений на її місці.
Summary. The purpose of this research is to present on the basis of archival sources, memoirs, and oral history testimonies the history of the largest transit prison in post-war Ukraine, to study the memory and the state of its memorialization in Lviv urban space. The scientific novelty of the article implies that for the first time different aspects of the prison are revealed in Ukrainian historiography. They include, in particular, the penitentiary regime and space, the composition of the prisoner contingent, resistance and escapes from the prison, the operation of the transit point, as well as conditions of the transportation of convicts to GULAG camps. Conclusions. Transit prison № 25 in Lviv was one of the central cites of Soviet mass violence in Lviv and the largest institution of such type in the Ukrainian SSR. Through its example one can realize how Nazi and Soviet violence intersected in an urban space where both systems often used the same premises and objects to isolate their victims. For many thousands of prisoners, the Lviv transit prison became an intermediate station/a transit point on the way from pre-trial detention to GULAG camps. It also served as a meeting point for inmates from Western Ukraine and Central Eastern European countries occupied by the Red Army. At different times, criminal and political prisoners, foremost members of the Ukrainian and Polish underground, were kept here. Despite conflicting political views, it was the pursuance of common interests of survival and resistance against the brutality of the prison administration and criminals that drew Ukrainian and Polish political prisoners together behind bars. Families of those repressed, including women and children, even babies, were kept in prison. This fact highlights "the family hostage taking" practice used by Soviet authorities against "enemies of the people" in Stalin՚s period. Between 1949 and 1950, the prison in parallel served as an integral part of the Soviet infrastructure of mass deportations, which affected families of members and sympathisers of the Ukrainian nationalist underground, wealthy farmers, and Greek-Catholic clergy in Western Ukraine. Due to the lack of documentary sources, it is nowadays impossible to establish even an approximate number of people who passed through the Lviv transit prison. The inmates՚ memory of their prison experience is ambiguous. Some recall the transit prison as a site of endless suffering and destitute, while others describe it as "the less evil" and some relief in comparison with pre-trial detention facilities run by the NKVD-MGB. Proper memorization of the site of the former transit prison in Lviv urban space has just started. This task is being performed by the Memorial Museum of "Territory of Terror", which has been created in this place. ; Анотація. Мета дослідження – на основі архівних документів, спогадів і матеріалів усної історії представити історію найбільшої пересильної тюрми на території України у повоєнний період, проаналізувати пам՚ять про неї і стан меморіалізації у міському просторі Львова. Наукова новизна полягає у тому, що вперше в історіографії розкриті різні аспекти функціонування тюрми, зокрема тюремний режим і простір, склад в՚язничного контингенту, спротив і втечі в՚язнів із тюрми, діяльність пересильного пункту, умови етапування засуджених до таборів ГУЛАГу. Висновки. Пересильна тюрма № 25 (1944–1955) була одним із центральних місць радянського масового насильства у Львові та найбільшою установою такого типу у повоєнний період в УРСР. На її прикладі можна простежити, як у міському просторі перетиналися нацистське і радянське насильства, адже обидва режими часто використовували ті самі приміщення та об՚єкти для примусової ізоляції жертв. Для багатьох тисяч в՚язнів львівська пересильна тюрма стала проміжною ланкою/транзитним пунктом на шляху між слідчими тюрмами й таборами ГУЛАГу. Вона була також місцем зустрічі людей із Західної України та зайнятих Червоною армією країн Центрально-Східної Європи. У різний період тут утримували як кримінальних, так і політичних в՚язнів, передусім учасників українського та польського підпілля. Попри різні політичні переконання, за колючим дротом останніх об՚єднували спільні інтереси виживання та протидії сваволі тюремного керівництва і кримінальників. У стінах в՚язниці утримувалися також сім՚ї репресованих – найчастіше жінки та діти, навіть немовлята. Це було прикладом «сімейного заручництва», яке широко практикувалося радянською владою щодо «ворогів народу» у сталінський період. У 1949–1950 рр. пересильна тюрма паралельно була частиною радянської інфраструктури масових депортацій, які охопили родини членів і симпатиків підпілля ОУН, заможних селян та греко-католицьке духовенство із Західної України. З огляду на брак архівних джерел, на сьогодні неможливо встановити хоча б приблизну кількість людей, які пройшли через львівську «пересилку». Пам՚ять в՚язнів про свій досвід перебування у тюрмі вирізняється строкатістю. Одні згадують про неї як про місце суцільних страждань і поневірянь, інші – як про «менше зло» і певне полегшення у порівнянні зі слідчими тюрмами НКВС-МДБ. Належна меморіалізація території колишньої тюрми у міському просторі Львова тільки розпочинається, чим опікується Меморіальний музей «Територія терору», створений на її місці.
