Haim Maor, Israel
Untitled I (Birkenau Silhouette), 2001
Color print photograph 70x100cm
Courtesy of the artist
“In the beginning they called me Haim Benjamin Moshkovitz,
like the name of my grandfather, my father’s father,
who was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942.
I was his walking shadow and echo of his image.
Without my knowing him, he was an inseparable train,
which trailed behind me or was laid on my shoulders.”
The series of Auschwitz-Birkenau shadows, for which the back of a beefy and fair haired figure serves as backdrop, presents the cursed paradox to which the artist is tied by an umbilical cord. With his very hands he carves upon living flesh and makes a memorial to the place in which man lost his humanity, and created a machine for exterminating human kind in the most sophisticated way, and with an efficiency nobody before or after could equal.
Cain Mark, 1978
Color print photograph & collage
64x42cm
Haim Maor’s work presents photographs of suspects whose blindfolded eyes prevent them from gazing at their surroundings, and whose identity is simultaneously hidden from surrounding eyes. Thus they become blind and helpless, while their being marked with a media code apparently protecting them, in fact marks them as a target. The black cloth covering the face of Cain does not prevent the mark of shame from disclosing his identity. The shape of the letter kuf reminds us of the symbol of a victim (the yellow star) and the mark of the legendary hero (Superman) and the murderer in the image of the swastika. The attacker, the victim and the hero all interlock in this piece into one complex and ambivalent persona.
