The Light in the Darkness installations.

 

- The Light in the Darkness Installations -

Installation dates: Originally planned for January 2021. 

New dates 2^nd to 14^th July at Leicester Unitarian Chapel, 45 East Bond Street.

Leicester Museum and Art Gallery New Walk Leicester from 21^st June to 19^th September 2021.

'Thou shall not Kill' Original Title: Du Sollst Nicht Töten.

 Year of production : 1930 Johannes Matthaeus Koeltz

© Estate of Johannes Koelz. All rights reserved, DACS 2013.

In March 2020 I was asked to create a response to the soon to be exhibited painting 'Thou shall not Kill' and link it with the plight of refugees, past and present. In the painting, the artist shows us the horror and destruction of war, as he quotes one of the Holy Commandments. In this large work, cut up and hidden from the Nazi regime, Johannes Matthaeus Koeltz exposes the futility, hypocrisy, and violence of armed conflict. This exhibition was also created to be part of the Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2021. 

Simon Lake a well-known Leicester-based curator, writer, and artist has recently published a fascinating account of artist Johannes Matthaeus Koelz’s life and the unparalleled work which put him and his family into exile – Thou Shalt Not Kill. You can find Simon's book The 'Painter's Hidden Masterpiece' here: https://simonlake.co.uk/

I am very grateful to Leicester Museums and Linda Harding, Community Engagement Officer for Leicester Museums and Galleries, for the opportunity to create something which although very personal, I hope will invite others to engage and contemplate our shared human story;  Many thanks also to The director of the Jewish Museum of Greece, Zanet Battinou and in particular  Anja Zuckmantel Administrative Director at Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Crete for permission to use the photographs depicting Leon Batsikas and Chrysoula Treveza and Claire Jackson for the photograph of her  Romanian Grandparents. The other three images showing my father and relatives are from my family album. The young boy is me. He symbolically 'exits' from the door side, looking for a better way, symbolising the innocence and promise of every new generation.

 My Artist's statement: 

The Light in the Darkness Installation symbolises the fragility of life and the power of hope and remembrance. The tents (one originally intended to be exhibited at the Leicester Museum and one at the Cathedral) speak of the common need for shelter by all exiled and displaced people and the duty to remember those that passed.  The photographs depict murdered Jewish and displaced people. Amongst the loved ones are African, Armenian, and Greek people from Turkey. (The latter are members of my family).  In the installation, the photographs appear and then fade as a searchlight casts them into sharp relief against the tent walls. The revolving light which is housed inside a 'black box’ records and exposes the sadness of the past but also illuminates the way to a better, more just tomorrow. The tents echo the temporary huts constructed for use during the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot, which is considered a joyous occasion. The sukkah shelter symbolises the fragility and transience of life and dependence on the Almighty.  The soundscape replays the voices of past lives, fragments of music and liturgical sounds. The tents are the same as those used in refugee camps and made specifically by the manufacturers for this installation. The hope is that after the exhibition they will be used as intended as stores or shelters. They stand as symbols, monuments to lost homes and lives whenever war and conflict have disrupted ordinary lives.   They reaffirm our commitment to justice for all persecuted and  displaced people.

George Sfougaras 2020.   

The text and images included in this post describe part of what turned out to be a six-month process of creating the Light in the Darkness work.  Some time ago whilst being interviewed about my practice as an artist, I suggested that putting myself in uncomfortable positions and experiencing the discomfort took me to new places and new work. It has been true but there is a trade-off in terms of personal investment, both emotionally and in terms of time. I think the thing to always remember is the 'Why', not the 'How'.  

It was in this spirit and with good intentions that I suggested to the Leicester Museum that I would like to depart from my usual printing work.  The idea of the tents occurred very early on in 2020, and it was my intention to make the structures and print on them. It did seem to me, however, that the tents themselves, the actual objects that would ultimately constitute the main part of the work, had to be 'real'.  They had to have a presence and a function that took them beyond the museum and the Cathedral spaces and into the unimaginable, yet very real failure and sadness of the refugee camps. 

The structures that visitors will experience in the exhibition are the main homes of millions of displaced people. I removed the windows to emphasise the spartan aspect of these temporary shelters. The walls protect from the wind, rain, and snow, but not from the cold or the heat. The floors are not waterproof and leakages are common. These structures are amongst some of the most frugal state-sponsored dwellings, the most nominal forms of temporary human housing. That was my starting point. 

Trying out the components in September 2020. After three months of waiting, mistaken delivery alerts (one alert incorrectly informed me that the two tents had arrived in Conception, Chile in late August 2020), and piecemeal arrival dates, all the parts arrived and were stored in Leicester Museum.  Everything was robust and well made by the manufacturers in China.

Trying out the early version of the revolving light system. The density of the material was as expected, allowing the images to be illuminated and 'cast' more intensely against the walls. 

Sometimes the solutions we look for are not as complex as we make them. I tried several configurations with a motor, changing the gears and the rigging.  Ultimately I settled for six identical motors, with some minor speed variations.  They would drive the lights and other elements inside the construction.  It was as ever with new undertakings, a journey of discovery. 

The configuration of the tents and assembly parts. These are heavy, storm-resistant shelters each weighing approximately 35 kilos. 

An early trial of the tents with images printed on varying density fabrics and transparencies. With Linda Harding, Community Engagement Officer for Leicester Museums and Galleries. 

The model of the tent with proposed images. 

A virtual animation of the installation.

Clip from the installation soundscape.

Images of the dispossessed and loved ones lost. 

Sharing a space of remembrance.

Cretan Jews murdered in WWII

Leon Betsikas, shown here in his Greek army uniform was born on 3 March 1917 in Hania and he lived with his parents (Raphael and Perla) and his four sisters (Chrysoula, Anna, Sterina und Sara) near the Etz Hayyim Synagogue in the old town of Hania. In early April 1944, Leon was arrested in Athens because he was Jewish and was deported to Auschwitz/Oświęcim, where he arrived on 18 April 1944. From there he was eventually brought to Mauthausen on 25 January 1945. He died in the camp a few weeks before its liberation, aged 28.

The photograph shows the 16-year-old Chrysoula Treveza in 1939. Chrysoula was born on the 2nd of October, 1923 in Hania and died on the 9^th June 1944, aged 20, alongside the entire Jewish population then living on the island of Crete.  The cargo ship Tanais was used by the Germans to carry the Jews of Crete to Piraeus, with the intention of taking them on to Auschwitz; however, they did not reach their destination. Evidence later appeared through the Foreign Office in London that the Tanais was sunk by a British submarine unaware of the Greek Jewish, Greek Christian and Italian prisoners on board. 

Photographs from the collection of the Jewish Museum of Greece. 

Photograph of a Romanian Jewish Family: Photograph from the family archive of Claire Jackson, Leicester.

Clara and her husband Jacob Rosenberg fled poverty and anti-Semitism in Romania and settled in England in 1914. A diverse overwhelmingly urban community, Jews were a target of religious persecution and racism in Romanian society. The Holocaust reduced the Jewish population of Romania from 756,930 in 1930, resulting in approximately 260,000 deaths. Significant waves of migration to Israel resulted in a dramatic decrease in the overall size of Romania's present-day Jewish community, estimated to be between 9,300 and 17,000. 

I include this wonderful message from Claire Jackson: 'Reading about the Turkish barber who shaped your father’s livelihood through his kindness, reminded me of my Romanian family’s own Light in the Darkness.

Impoverished Jewish immigrants to the East End in the late 19th and early 20th century were given the names and addresses of poor rabbis in London who lived in small two-room slum apartments with their many children in one room and their wives and babies in the other. Whilst the incomers from Romania, Russia or Poland were looking for accommodation, they would be accommodated by the rabbis, occupying the children’s room with their own family whilst the rabbi’s entire family lived in the one small room.  Clara and Jacob were given this welcome by a Romanian rabbi in London for several months and I know that the artist Mark Gertler’s family were given similar support.  I call this generosity Light in the Darkness too!'

                                 

Family photographs from the Sfougaras/Nicolaides/Georgiadis archives.

The woman in the photograph is Dimitra Georgiadi. She was 7 years old when her family was displaced in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War, in 1922. The little boy is my brother Nikolaos and the young woman is my cousin Evdokia. The Georgiadis family were resettled in Crete, where they imported the cultivation of grapes for raisins and changed the agricultural as well as the urban landscape of Crete, indeed the whole of Greece. Overall, one and a half million Christians and half a million Muslims were displaced in an exchange of populations. 

A rare photograph of my father and his life-long friend Kostas.My father, from the Greek community of Istanbul and Kostas an Armenian, both left Turkey after the 1919-1922 war which resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, often in orchestrated ethnic violence. Both men’s names changed as they became Greek citizens. Kostas, originally Konstantin Zaccharian, became Konstantinos Tsagarian and my father, originally Christoforos Nicolaidis, became Christos Sfougaras. One’s name was Hellenised, the other changed for unknown reasons. 

Approximately three decades before this photograph of me was taken, my family had been forced to leave the place of their birth because of their religion. This major compulsory population exchange, or agreed mutual expulsion, was based not on language or ethnicity, but upon religious identity, and involved nearly all the indigenous Orthodox Christian citizens of Turkey including even Turkish-speaking Orthodox citizens, and most of the native Muslims of Greece, including even Greek-speaking Muslim citizens, such as Cretan ‘Turks’. These religious, rather than ethnic groups were citizens, and the vast majority were born within the state which expelled them. If you were Christian you were deemed to be Greek, if Muslim, Turkish. This resulted in two 'homogeneous' countries, Greece and Turkey, which had for many centuries had supported multi-faith communities. Each country then proceeded to erase the history of the ‘other’ by changing names of places and converting places of worship into either mosques or churches. It is one of the very few photographs, precious as they were at that time. These images of childhood are ubiquitous now, and perhaps in the future, their sheer volume will reduce their potency. The child superimposed on the door of the shelter signifies a new life emerging from turmoil. My parents, despite their losses, taught me to look beyond national and religious affiliations. They spoke of the good experiences before the war and recounted some of these to me when I was growing up. These stories of kindness, such as the time my 10-year father was taught his life-long trade by a kind Turkish barber, are the ‘Light in the Darkness’ which has spurred me on to reject hate in favour of acceptance and hope. 

George Sfougaras 2020-21.

Human figure model and shadow play inside the tent.