Eighteen Ghettos I (polyptich), 2008
Oil, casein, rabbit skin glue and chalk on burlap
18 pieces of 18.5 x 15.4 in / 47 x 39 cm, each
aprox. 71.3 x 131.5 in / 181 x 334 cm
Eighteen Ghettos II (polyptich), 2009
Casein, rabbit skin glue and chalk on burlap
18 pieces of 18.5 x 15.4 in / 47 x 39 cm, each
aprox. 71.3 x 131.5 in / 181 x 334 cm
Eighteen Ghettos III (polyptich), 2009
Oil, casein, rabbit skin glue and chalk on wood
18 pieces of 18.5 x 15.4 in / 47 x 39 cm, each
aprox. 71.3 x 131.5 in / 181 x 334 cm
Eighteen Ghettos IV (polyptich), 2009
Oil, casein, rabbit skin glue and chalk on wood
18 pieces of 18.5 x 15.4 in / 47 x 39 cm, each
aprox. 71.3 x 131.5 in / 181 x 334 cm
Eighteen Ghettos V (polyptich), 2010
Oil, casein, spray painting, chalk and rabbit skin glue on wood
18 pieces of 18.5 x 15.4 in / 47 x 39 cm, each
aprox. 71.3 x 131.5 in / 181 x 334 cm
Eighteen Ghettos is a series of five polyptychs, each formed by eighteen individual pieces that represent the maps of the Jewish ghettos in Poland and other Eastern European cities: Bochnia, Brody, Bialystok, Czestochowa, Kielce, Kolomyja, Krakow, Lublin, Lodz, Lviv, Minsk, Piotrków Trybunalski, Przemysl, Riga, Rzeszow, Siedlce, Tarnów and Vilnius. The Nazis created these urban spaces of exception and turned them into islands of extreme degradation within the cities. Historical knowledge and artistic investigation into the contour of these maps open up possibilities to ethically and politically conceive the design of this city development of death: these arbitrary, closed and rigid geometric forms, which reveal a very neat separation between an interior and an exterior, between an inside and an outside, are the visual metaphor of the policy of racial exclusion and segregation that Nazism forced on European Jews before exterminating them.
