30 October 2019

Host: Nina Prader | artist, writer, researcher
Text: Marianne Hirsch: The Generation of Post Memory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2012 (essay)
Venue: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna | IKl, Karl-Schweighofer-Gasse 3, 1070 Vienna

Abstract: Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Focusing on the remembrance of the Holocaust, this essay elucidates the generation of postmemory and its reliance on photography as a primary medium of transgenerational transmission of trauma. Identifying tropes that most potently mobilise the work of postmemory, it examines the role of the family as a space of transmission and the function of gender as an idiom of remembrance.

Host: Nina Prader is an artist, arts and culture writer and researcher, specialising in alternative media and publishing practices. She received her MA in Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria, and previously studied at the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston/ Tufts University and at the Slade in London/UCL. She has exhibited and published in Berlin, Boston, Vienna, and London.