Grant Me Light

The past is not dead and history is always something we wander into. So much is hidden, so much is concealed, so much has happened, so much can yet happen. Some things should never happen but do. For the Jews of Europe, the path enters and exits the abyss of the Holocaust.

This is a meditation on hidden histories and the span and affliction of anti-Semitism.

On exhibit are explorations of a diaspora story that includes me, with roots in a disintegrating Europe of the early 19th century (and earlier with a long list of forced dispersion and exile, edicts and pogroms dating back beyond antiquity), arriving in the new world, continuing in the southern hemisphere and returning to a reconstructed Europe and coming to a sudden standstill in Lapland, in my very garden, where the past is here firmly in the present.

Woven inside these images, like parallel threads, is my part of this diaspora story. I have attempted to bring to light via this exhibition what is deeply personal and yet sadly universal, and still very much so in the present day.