Preview: A Wounded Landscape – Bearing Witness to the Holocaust by Marc Wilson @ Side Gallery | NARC. | Reliably Informed | Music and Creative Arts News for Newcastle and the North East

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A Wounded Landscape combines contemporary documentary imagery with audio testimony and reminds us how the Nazis and their collaborators perpetrated this atrocity over a vast landscape in radically different environments and how experiences of persecution usually started in places that the persecuted called home.

Between 1939-45 six million Jews and people from other groups ideologically opposed to the Nazism, or whom the Nazi’s deemed inferior, were murdered across 40.000 sites. The European landscape is scarred by the physical traces of this campaign of persecution and destruction. Some of these traces are conspicuous, bearing names recognised worldwide such as Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz, others are far less known, having been reabsorbed into our everyday world via the passage of time, and include cities, towns, villages, fields, and forests. Combined they formed a pathway to genocide: destroyed communities and ghettos, internment camps, transit camps, labour camps, sub-camps, concentration camps, displacement camps and extermination camps. They were places where literal life-or-death decisions were made but also sites of hope, survival, and memory.

Between 2015-2021, photographer Marc Wilson journeyed across 130 locations in 20 countries, documenting the physical traces of the Holocaust and the stories of 22 survivors and their descendants. Their experiences are recounted in English, French, Hebrew, Polish, Dutch and Russian. 

This exhibition receives its world premiere at Side Gallery, Newcastle on Saturday 4th February and at 2pm launches with an opening event where Marc will introduce ‘A Wounded Landscape’ and discuss his motivations and approach to undertaking this long term project (to book your place, click here).

The exhibition takes place until Sunday 9th April.

Rita Weiss family photos. Tel Aviv, Israel. December 2017. ©Marc Wilson

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