Exegesis art, the family & genocide
Through video, performance and installation, this thesis investigates concepts and politics of memory, trauma, identity and representation. It does so by utilising two main ciphers–1) the Nazi and Soviet persecution of ethnic Poles, and 2) the post-event family of Polish survivors–to investigate five defined streams of enquiry: 1. the capacity of art to both effectively represent and affectively convey trauma 2. the genocidal and post-event experiential realities of ethnic Poles 3. the continued, post-event existence of trauma and it's intergenerational transmission 4. the politics of Holocaust representation and the concept of the survivor, both acknowledged and unacknowledged as Other 5. the connections these concerns have with, i) the psycho-social and sociopolitical representational practices of the wider community; and, ii) the geopolitics of modern nation-states.