Esther Strauss bore the name Marie Blum for a year. The performance artist and lecturer for language arts at the Linz Art University came up with this person, who only lived to be three days old in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, through a poem by the Serbian writer Rajko Djuric. In his poem “Born in Auschwitz, died in Auschwitz” he mentioned twelve names of children, including Marie Blum’s.
For a year, Strauss also legally bore the name of the baby born on September 5, 1943, in order to erect a performative memorial for the murdered child and many of those who shared his fate. Strauss was in Oswiecim (Auschwitz) for study purposes and did relevant research in his own family biography. “My goal was to make this murder visible,” says the 36-year-old artist, who has now received the Talent Promotion Prize from Energie AG (4,000 euros) in cooperation with Landes-Kultur GmbH for her work “Sky over Oswiecim”. has been. Her work, a photo showing the sky over Auschwitz and the text “I lay down my name to carry yours for you for a year. It leads me to the place where you were born and murdered. I knees down” is fascinating and chilling at the same time.
A work that symbolizes the memorial site for the Roma and Sinti murdered in concentration camps by the Nazis, which is still missing in Austria 77 years after the end of the Second World War. It can be seen in Energie AG’s PowerTower in Linz’s Böhmerwaldstraße until September 16, on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Works by Linda Luse (Talent Promotion Prize), Xian Zheng, Georg Pinteritsch (each Klemens Brosch Prize, endowed with 4,000 euros) and Jens Höffken (Dream Scholarship, 6,000 euros) are also on display. A series of pictures by Herbert W. Franke, the pioneer of computer art, will also be shown. Highly recommended! (at)
Exhibition: “Talent and established” in Energie AG’s PowerTower until September 12, Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Source: Nachrichten
