This is a series of photographic portraits of Greek Jewish survivors of the Nazi camps, who after the war resettled in Greece. Aged between 77 and 104, the subjects of these photographic portraits surrender to a dynamic silence. These faces, recorded in World War II history, unfold their memory in front of the photographic lens. Portraits of Auschwitz survivors as well as Greek Sephardic Jews who were deported to Bergen-Belsen camp are on display.
From 2012, the artist Artemis Alcalay has been researching, traveling all over Greece and abroad and meeting with survivors of the thriving pre-war Jewish communities. While building a bridge between historical documentation and art, the artist combines the survivor with her own artwork from the series “home: a wandering” within the same frame. The archetypal shape of the home-hearth, a manifestation of joy, happiness and family warmth, recalls memories and begins a fruitful dialogue between past and present, trauma and healing, speech and silence. According to the journalist Nikos Vatopoulos, for Artemis Alcalay every meeting was a personal submersion, as well as an opening, each time in a different world. She found herself face to face with these heroic everyday figures, who carry the number of the camp, a stain on their arm, “a sign that points to the trauma, that activates the memory”.
