While spending a year in Seoul as visiting professor, Eve Rosenhaft has been collaborating with colleagues at Sogang University and with Korean artists and activists to develop a new exhibition.
Entitled Unwelcome Neighbours. Portraits of ‘Gypsy’ Victims of the Holocaust and Others, the exhibition is on display at the Korea Foundation Gallery in central Seoul until the end of February 2019, with the support of the Korea Foundation and the British Council.
The main part of the exhibition shows photographs from Liverpool University Library’s special collections – photos of Sinti (‘Gypsies’) taken by the photographer Hanns Weltzel in the German town of Rosslau during the 1930s. Nearly all of the subjects of the photos were murdered in the Holocaust, among the hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma who fell victim to the Nazi genocide, and the exhibition tells their stories.
The photographs have already been used for an exhibition created by Eve Rosenhaft and Jana Müller (Dessau), which is travelling in Europe and will be on display in Liverpool for the second time in May 2019. However, this is the first time the photos have been shown outside of Europe.
Visually, the exhibition places special emphasis on the contrast between Weltzel’s photos and the mugshots of the same people taken by the police who monitored and harassed them. The relationship between the (non-Sinto) photographer Weltzel and the subjects of his photographs is a theme of the exhibition, drawing the attention of visitors to questions of responsibility and ethical action.
The key message is that the Nazi persecution of ‘Gypsies’ emerged out of long-standing prejudices and practices of institutional racism, and the exhibition closes with a set of photographs and documents of immigrants and refugees in contemporary South Korea, inviting visitors to ask themselves what they are doing to combat discrimination in their own society. A short documentary film about the exhibition by a leading South Korean filmmaker is in preparation.
The Seoul exhibition was designed especially for the gallery space by photographer Sohn Yisook and artist Ja Woonyung, and includes imaginative installations and works of art that interpret the history.
Eve says:
I’ve always approached these photos from a documentary perspective. It’s been a revelation for me to work with artists who have injected an aesthetic dimension into the presentation without undermining the core ethical and political message.