Last Folio - Books of the Dead - Yuri Dojc's art at the Hamilton Art Gallery
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By Stephen Weir
Edited version posted by Huffington Post
Moscow. Jerusalem.
Vatican City. São Paulo. Canadian photographer Yuri Dojc is is known and admired for his world
vision. His photographs of crumbling
synagogues, badly decayed Torahs scrolls and discarded school books he
discovered in a rotting 70-years locked
Jewish school in Slovakia are seen as instruments of change in a battle against
cultural genocide.
Here in Canada
little is known about his travelling exhibition of pictures of those holocaust
books. That is because he is Canada’s most accomplished nude photographer. That
may changes now that his Last Folio exhibition has finally arrived in Canada,
and people in Ontario are seeing his passion and his dread of mankind’s darkside.
The Last Folio is an
exhibition, an art book and a documentary movie, based on the Slovakia pictures
he has taken. The exhibition that
continues to tour in Europe, Israel, South America and the United States just
opened in Hamilton, Ontario.
Time had stood still
since 1942 in Bardejov, Slovakia, until ten years ago Dojc returned to visit
his family’s ancestral home. There was once a thriving Jewish community in the North-Eastern Slovakia town but that ended a long time ago. It was
on the eve of World War II, many of the villagers had fled, and those remaining
were taken away to concentration camps.
Serendipity led Dojc,
along with a documentary film team to the local Jewish school, which had been
locked since the day their students were deported to the concentration camps.
All the schoolbooks were still there, including essay notebooks with
corrections.
The decomposing books,
which were lying on dusty shelves, are the last witnesses of a once thriving
culture. Dojc photographed each book like
the survivors they are–each one captured as a portrait, preserved in their
final beauty, silent witnesses to the horrors of history.
It was oh so personal
for the Toronto photographer. Amongst the hundreds of books and fragments he photographed
one instantly seared his soul – it had belonged to his grandfather, Jakab Deutsch.
“The Holocaust is
something, it is a topic that I have avoided all my life, but now in my 60s, it
eventually caught up with me,” said Yuri Dojc, explaining how he turned his
photographs of those books into the global travelling show he calls Last Folio.
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| School found by Yuri Dojc unused since WW2 |
“This exhibition
started in 1997, it was a total departure from what I was doing until
then. This work actually changed me as a
person and as a photographer. This is a
show about cultural memory. Memories of people
who never came home. Memories about my parents, from whom I just got scraps of what happened during my childhood.
“ What I was
fascinated with is the beauty of the decaying books … they are monuments to people who used to
own them . Most of the people who owned those books did not return from the camps.
There were no funerals, there were no headstones, there is nothing to show they
lived, except what I was able to picture. Those books are their tombs and at
the same time they are acts of defiance against those people who tried to
destroy (it all). “
It is Dojc’s
stunningly beautiful photographs that let us experience the vibrant cultural
history of Slovakian Jews through the now abandoned schools, synagogues and
mikvahs (ceremonial baths) he remembers with his camera.
“There is a reason
why I call it Last Folio. It was the last stand. The people are all gone, the
books 90% of them are gone and the other10% will be gone in five years because
of neglect. A project like this is just a cultural memory -- nothing else. The photographs are all that I can do.”
In Brazil the
arrival of the show was frontpage news. Last month a television special was
broadcast throughout the country comparing Dojc’s exhibition with what is
happening in Allepo, Syria.
“The news feature talks
of how easily cultures can be destroyed by war,” explained Dojc. “They said I
was showing a culture that was killed 70-years ago and now we are watching the
destruction of another culture, in real time in Syria. So what have we learned
over those 70 years? My pictures
preserve and hopefully we learn!”
Art Gallery of
Hamilton is exhibiting the Last Folio, The show opened last week and
will remain on view until May 14, 2017.
George Socka interviewed Yuri Dojc at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Now posted on You Tube
https://youtu.be/JC3TprF53-M
RELATED WEBSITES
http://www.artgalleryofhamilton.com/ex_current.php#lastfolio
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