“The Skin: Space for Repression and Expression”
Mirta’s lecture was a brief presentation on how she uses art as a way of trying to make connections with her parents as Holocaust survivors. She stated that one of her motives for working as an artist is to try to understand and interpret their experiences by exploring ideas of loss and pain. She incorporates photographs, videos, sculptures, etchings, and embroidery into her work. The woman who introduced Mirta described her work as “juxtapositions of naturalistic details with dream-like scenes.”
The work she discussed dealt mainly with the skin, specifically the act of tattooing or permanently marking the skin. I found it especially interesting how she discussed the differences in how the skin is marked by tattooing (i.e. deciding to get a tattoo as an ornamental decoration/expression vs. being tattooed against your will with a number that becomes equivalent to your entire identity). Both of these ways of tattooing affect a person’s identity, in how they perceive themselves as well as how others perceive them. However, she seemed to be most struck by how much of her parents’ identities were lost during the Holocaust, how they were forced to have a number tattooed on their arms, and how they became completely associated with just those five digits. Since her parents were both survivors, she felt that these numbers became very powerful symbols of their experience and their struggle, as representations of the “skin of memory.”
The bulk of the work she presented and discussed, including the video, involved embroidery. In the same way that the needle is used to puncture the skin in the process of tattooing, Mirta uses the needle in the process of embroidering as a symbol of this pain (the literal pain of being tattooed and the larger concept of the pain of the Holocaust on those involved). One detail of the lecture really stuck with me as I left. She mentioned that she often asked her parents about the significance of the numbers when she was younger, and that there answer would always be, “not to forget.” While this is interesting in itself, I was particularly drawn to how she has become somewhat obsessed with the numbers in a way, perhaps as a way of holding onto her parents’ identities in relation to this horrifying experience that has had tremendous impact on their lives. This is something that Mirta was not there to experience, so she uses the numbers and the memories of her experiences with her parents after the Holocaust as a way to understand their struggle. She even said that she only uses her mother’s number because she cannot remember her father’s number (her father died before she became interested in using these numbers in her work), and that she would never use a fake number because that would be like taking away his identity. This is a powerful statement, one that puts their experience into perspective and lets us feel the impact and weight of the subject matter she is dealing with in her work.
Much of her discussion was purely conceptual. While I found this to be helpful in trying to understand her work, I found myself wanting to know a bit more about technical information, such as how she made some of her collage pieces, or why she chose to work in certain mediums. A specific example of something of interest to me was the significance of the chair with wings that appeared in many of her pieces. She mentioned something about the chair acting as a stable place, while often the figures she depicts in the works appear separated from the chair as a symbol of their instability and fragility. I enjoy this concept, but I think that the connection to her ideas was a little bit unclear. Perhaps it was because of some issues with the clarity of her speaking, but some parts of the presentation were definitely a little fuzzy. Overall, I was surprised at how quickly she moved through the presentation, and how often I found myself wondering or wanting to know more. However, I was very interested in the visual qualities of her work, specifically its graphic appearance and boldness, as well as how it seemed to deal with layering and altered spatial perception.
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