August 27 – December 15, 2024
Opening Reception, Thursday, September 5
The William Benton Museum of Art: 5–7pm
Contemporary Galleries: 6–8pm
“Must we say again” argues Georges Didi-Huberman, “that Auschwitz is unimaginable? Certainly not: one must, on the contrary, say that Auschwitz is only imaginable, that we are bound to images.” Yet, while imperative, “any recourse to the image is [necessarily] inadequate, incomplete.” Prussian Blue presents Mexican artist Yishai Jusidman’s haunting reflection on this ethical and representational conundrum. Through the medium of painting, Jusidman explores the extent to which visual imagery can effectively represent the horror of the Holocaust, or any horror, for that matter. If not, what can painting offer instead? Might the inevitable inadequacy of representation be embedded in the representation itself?
Prussian blue, a pigment chemically related to the Zyklon-B gas used by the Nazis, is the very substance that closes the paintings’ representational gap, while emphasizing as well the safety of art spectatorship. Thus, the aesthetic dilemma becomes an ethical one. Prussian Blue plunges us deep into the heart of this predicament. Offering no panacea, the artist’s depictions of the now empty architectures and landscapes of the concentration, work and extermination camps denies us any position of comfort or moral certainty, any consoling illusion that we have somehow moved beyond such barbarism.
Guest curated by Jose Falconi, Assistant Professor of Art History & Human Rights, and Robin Greeley, Professor of Art History, the exhibition is displayed across three venues—UConn’s William Benton Museum of Art, Contemporary Art Galleries, and The Dodd Center for Human Rights. It is co-sponsored by the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program of Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs, the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, and UConn Global Affairs. Prussian Blue inaugurates the “Nuremberg-ICTY Archives Initiative,” which invites artists to create contemporary responses to these important archives at UConn.
Programs:
Art Encounters: The Residue of Memory, Friday, October 18, 12:30 – 1:30pm.
