'I was looking for signs, but it was nothing, there was
nothing.'
While he was studying at the National Academy of Art in Amsterdam,
the Israeli artist Itay Ziv (1976) embarked on his project My
Ghetto.
Ziv, the son of a Polish Jew, grew up in Israel. In Israeli
society, pictures of Polish ghettos symbolize the Shoah. During the
Nazi regime, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were forced to
live in ghettos, most of which were surrounded by walls and barbed
wire that cut them off from the outside world. Conditions inside
were generally appalling and degrading, and many people died there.
Those who lived in the ghettos were later deported and murdered.
My Ghetto was created as a personal statement about the
way in which one Israeli individual deals with the memory of the
Shoah.
Ziv created an imaginary ghetto, into which he incorporated images
of his neighbourhood, his studio, and some of his friends.
Meanwhile, he decided to make a trip to Poland, to go and look
around the site that had once been an actual ghetto; he wanted to
know how it felt to stand on that historic ground. After this trip,
he realized that it was impossible for any photograph to do justice
to the reality of what had taken place in a ghetto during the
Second World War. From then on, he decided to film himself at
locations he classified as 'safe': hotels and his room, as well as
in his studio, in which he shares his experiences in his own
imaginary ghetto with the viewer.
In a 15-minute monologue, Ziv provides a detailed account of a
visit to a nameless destination in Europe. The artist, or more
precisely eight fictional characters, conjure up bare walls and
huge, locked buildings, swastikas, and a grey, hostile atmosphere.
The fragmentary presentation of the images, combined with the grim
and emotional narrative tone, create the impression that Ziv is
talking about events that he has just witnessed himself. He draws
on familiar visual images of the Shoah, but Ziv's ghetto is his own
fictional reality; it is an arbitrary location.
In the second part - with a blues-like melody playing in the
background - the artist translates the song My Ghetto
(sung in Hebrew) by the Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin: Bitter
ghetto, sweet ghetto, hated ghetto, beloved ghetto. My
Ghetto provokes questions about the relationship between
image, history, and memory, about identity and personal experience,
and about the way in which the Shoah is embedded in the collective
memory of Israel.
Itay Ziv belongs to a generation of artists who approach the Shoah
in a new, confrontational and associative way: they do not see it
as an event that took place in the past, but as a collective trauma
of the present day. In their work, they set out deliberately to
elicit an emotional response from the viewer.