“Under Your White Stars” Varda Getzow

Most often, this is due to conditions related to the place of presentation or installation of the work. This is also the case with her solo exhibition “Under Your White Stars”, shown in Krakow. The Holocaust forms the context of the presented works through two historical places: Oskar Schindler's Enamel Factory and KL Plaszow Memorial Site. However, the artist approaches the subject somewhat differently, in a more universal perspective, making children and their suffering the motif of her works. The works on display address the post-memory of the Holocaust not through a direct message, but by evoking a sense of horror, disruption, alienation and ambivalence in the viewer. The contact with Varda Getzow's art is based on the emotions aroused not by the image itself, but also by everything that is deliberately left out.

Varda Getzow's drawings depict children, often lonely, crippled, helpless, and abandoned. Their somewhat conventional images are contrasted with a section of the exhibition presenting archival photographs of Jewish children from the interwar period. The photographs, taken in Poland, show the children at play, studying, celebrating holidays and important family occasions, in their familiar surroundings. The children, although still anonymous, have faces, and thus - gain subjectivity in the eyes of the viewer.

Both the location of the exhibition and the evocation of a poem by Abraham Sutzkever, written in the Vilna Ghetto, in the exhibition title inextricably link Varda Getzow's works to the fate of the children murdered during the Holocaust. However, the author draws attention to the universality of the problem – in our modern times, the suffering of children as a result of armed conflicts is still a topical and unresolved issue.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue by curator Dr. Dalia Manor. The publication includes an essay by the curator on Varda Getzow's work, both her Krakow solo exhibition and her earlier works. The book is enriched with numerous reproductions of Varda Getzow's works and her artistic biography.

Varda Getzow was born in Israel in 1955. After graduating in 1974 from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and then from the Kalisher School of Painting in Tel Aviv, she was active primarily in Israel, although her acclaimed expressionist exhibition Einfach ein Schwein (It's Only a Pig) from 1982, shown in Tel Aviv and later in Berlin, tied her to the latter city for a long time. After moving to Germany, Varda Getzow tackled the difficult German-Jewish relations, while her techniques began to evolve toward more subtle forms of expression. With a year's stay in London, made possible by a grant from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and a collaboration with the Whitechapel Art Gallery, she began experimenting with ready-made objects, site-specific installations, and themes of belonging and alienation, which became close to her through her family background. In later years, as part of her artistic and social activities, guided by her mission to restore the humanity of the nameless victims of the Holocaust and wishing to make their historical existence more real and visualise their memory, she initiated the laying of the so-called - Stolpersteine - memorial stones in Cochem and Berlin.

What turns out to be of significance in the artist's work is not only the subjects she reaches for, but also the spaces she chooses for her exhibitions. Her works have been presented not only in numerous museums in Israel, Berlin, London, Madrid and Łódź, but also in a shopping centre in Tel Aviv, a hotel room in London and in the New Synagogue in Berlin (in 2001).

The latest works in her solo exhibition “Under Your White Stars”, inspired by the green grounds of the Plaszow Concentration Camp Memorial and presented at the Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory, take on additional context through a self-evident reference to the difficult history of the city of Krakow.

Varda Getzow’s exhibition titled “Under Your White Stars” is on display from October 6, 2022 at the Oskar Schindler's Enamel Factory on ul. Lipowa 4. It is curated by Dr. Dalia Manor.

The title of Varda Getzow’s exhibition “Under Your White Stars” (Yiddish: “Under dajne wajse sztern”) is also the title of a poem by Abraham Sutzkever, one of the most famous authors of Yiddish literature. The author was born into a rabbinical family in Smorgon, in what is now Belarus, on July 15, 1913. He grew up and studied in Vilnius, where he soon became involved with the Jung Wilne literary group promoting the idea of Yiddishism. He published his works in major Jewish periodicals, such as “Der Moment” and “In Zicht”. His first volume of poems entitled “Lider” was enthusiastically received by the literary community, especially the society of the Jewish Institute of Science. During the war, he stayed in the Vilna Ghetto, still actively creating. It was then that he wrote his most famous poem, “Kol Nidrej”, the text of which, with the help of partisans, was transported to Moscow and first published there. Sutzkever was active in Yitzhak Wittenberg's United Partisan Organization and in an informal group seeking to save the scientific and cultural legacy of the Jews of Vilnius. His wife and newborn child were murdered in the ghetto. After the ghetto was liquidated, he hid with a Polish friend, and in 1944, thanks to the intercession of Russian artists, he was sent to Moscow, where he resumed his literary activities. After the war, during the Nuremberg trials, he acted on behalf of the USSR as the sole Jewish prosecutor. In 1947, he emigrated to Israel. Until his death in 2010, he was active in many Israeli organisations focused on preserving Yiddish culture. In 1966, he was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The use of a quotation from a poem written in one of Europe's ghettos by a poet inextricably linked to Jewish culture in the exhibition's title unambiguously sets the theme taken up by the artist in the context of the Holocaust.

The poem chosen is not accidental, it deliberately refers to the juxtaposition of human anguish with the unchanging rhythm of nature. Death occurs during a starry night, emphasising the indifference of nature to the fate of man and the world. The beauty embodied in the landscape exists united yet completely detached from the cruelty represented by the actions of the human species. The verse from Sutzkever's poem is an invitation to take a broader look at the proposed narrative and outline the issue of the inseparability of the coexistence of different art forms and the visual imagination.

Varda Getzow’s exhibition titled “Under Your White Stars”, presented in the premises of the Oskar Schindler's Enamel Factory, not only through the exhibition space, but also through the inspiration from the green grounds of the former German concentration camp Plaszow, intentionally pointed out in the installation, clearly embeds the mainstream of the artist's considerations around the events of World War II, and in particular its impact on the most vulnerable victims – children.

The black and white space of the exhibition is contrasted with green fabric covering part of the surface. In this installation, digital photographs taken by the artist during her visit to Krakow were used. Thus, the narrative does not take place in a void, but is presented in juxtaposition with the local environment, creating a multidimensional context. The photographs were taken in Krakow's botanical garden and on the grounds of the KL Plaszow Memorial Site. The first space, representing humanistic concern for nature and development and emphasizing man's centuries-old quest for cognition, is juxtaposed with a green, almost empty site of a former concentration camp. For the author, places with very different histories, which represent entirely different human attitudes, are not only a representation of Krakow's history but also a realization of the idea of nature acting as a witness. This, in turn, refers to the title of the exhibition and the message of Abraham Sutzkever's poem, from which the verse derives. A green carpet printed with photos of green meadows overgrowing the grounds of the former Plaszow Concentration Camp not only refers to the natural cycle of nature that takes place regardless of ongoing events or human tragedies, but also serves as a reminder of the human tendency to suppress difficult history. The artist herself pointed out this fact during her visit to the memorial site and the sight of strollers unreflectively visiting the space, enjoying nature, forgetting or completely unaware of the history of the place. Varda skillfully asks questions – about human memory, oblivion and its dangers, the recurrence of certain tragedies in the future.