Member-only story
Remembrance IncARnaTe In Inherited Memories
at Castelli Art Space, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Inherited Memories, at Castelli Art Space in Culver City, is a graceful, poignant, intensely moving exhibition from Shula Singer Arbel, Dwora Fried, and Malka Nedivi. Each of the three artists has created powerful, transcendent work that deals with the fact their mothers survived the Holocaust. They acknowledge their mothers’ traumas and the way in which their mothers’ memories have affected their own work, and their own lives.
The result is rewarding, deep, and haunting, as the artists pay tribute to their mothers’ survival and serve as the next generation of witnesses to the horror and hate of the Holocaust. The work is important not just personally but contemporarily: our current political and social landscape has seen a devasting increase in hate craimes and anti-Semitism. To say we as a society “must never forget” the Holocaust is somewhat facile, for to not forget we must in fact remember, and to remember we need to evoke memories as passionate and profound as those which these three artists allow viewers to witness here.
Each artist shapes work in a different medium. Arbel’s paintings are lyrical and lovely, awash in a color palette that is achingly beautiful. What they represent are some deeply intimate places and events. In…
