Artist Talk: Last Folio: Yuri Dojc

Art Gallery of Hamilton

2017

Artist Yuri Dojc discusses the exhibition Last Folio: Yuri Dojc, on view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton until May 14, 2017.

Time had stood still since 1942 in a small Jewish village in Slovakia, until nearly 10 years ago when Canadian photographer Yuri Dojc returned to visit his family’s former home. 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 1943. All the school books were still there, including essay notebooks with corrections, even the sugar was still in the cupboard. The decaying books, which were lying on dusty shelves, the last witnesses of a once thriving culture, are treated by Dojc like the survivors they are, each one captured as a portrait, preserved in their final beauty, silent witnesses to the horrors of history.

The images in Last Folio are a last memento of the culture and people who used those books. Most of them are forgotten, they don’t have relatives or graves. I tried to memorialize them. This is not a documentary but my personal salute to a vanished culture and a vanished people.Artist Yuri Dojc discusses the exhibition Last Folio: Yuri Dojc, on view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton until May 14, 2017.

Time had stood still since 1942 in a small Jewish village in Slovakia, until nearly 10 years ago when Canadian …

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