Remembering in Painting: Project Treblinka 2004… of Zofia Lipecka

Zofia Lipecka is a Polish-French artist, who has lived in Paris since 1975. I want to devote my paper to the Project Treblinka of Lipecka. She started this work in 2004 intentionally referring to one documentary photograph which is currently in the collection of Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyr’s and Heroes’ Remembrance in Jerusalem. It was taken by an unknown photographer, probably before 1945. The indistinct photograph presents a German signboard, on a boundary marker with the name of the town Treblinka. Every year since 2004 Lipecka has travelled to Treblinka to stop before a sign with the name of the town so as to take a photo of the way towards the former death camp. The artist faithfully copies the grasped view in a painted picture. In spite of the fact that in 2012 the information sign with the name Treblinka on it was moved several hundred meters away, the artist still photographs and paints the same place.

This work is a form of the testimony of our memory (a cycle of photographs taken by the artist) as well as the absence of memory. These pictures-photographs provoke the questions about preserving events from the past years, which took place in this part of Europe. How can we remember and understand them?

This art is about what has been lost, about the inability of memory and artifacts to re-create what has been lost. But it is also about a never-ending human struggle to attempt that re-creation, against all the odds.