Dienstag, 8. Oktober 2019, 18:00 - 19:30

Wiener Wiesenthal Institut, Research Lounge, 1010 Vienna, Rabensteig 3, 3rd Floor

Host: Dani Gal | artist-in-residence
Text: Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford University Press, 2009 (excerpt)

Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book makes a two-fold argument about Holocaust memory in a global age by situating it in the unexpected context of decolonisation. On the one hand, it demonstrates how the Holocaust has enabled the articulation of other histories of victimisation at the same time that it has been declared “unique” among human-perpetrated horrors. On the other, it uncovers the more surprising and seldom acknowledged fact that public memory of the Holocaust emerged in part thanks to postwar events that seem at first to have little to do with it. In particular, Multidirectional Memory highlights how ongoing processes of decolonisation and movements for civil rights in the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere unexpectedly galvanized memory of the Holocaust.

Dani Gal is a Berlin-based visual artist. He investigates how personal and collective histories and memorisations are produced, selected and carried through time and space by means of intense research and the examination of historical visual, written and audio documents in dialogue with current political occurrences and contemporary cultural narratives. He is Blood Mountain’s 2019 artist-in-residence and hosted in association with the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute.

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