A Memorial, a Synagogue, a Bridge and a Church

HD / 12 min. / Black and white / Bratislava / 2012

In Maya Schweizer's video “A Memorial, A Synagogue, A Bridge and A Church”, a square is turned into a laboratory setting, the artist into a meticulous observer of everyday situations. Where are we? The location is “Fish Square”, Rybné námestie, in Bratislava. Here stands “The Holocaust Monument”, a five-meter high bronze statue by the Slovakian artist Milan Luká?. It was erected in 1996/97 where the old synagogue once stood. From the detailed observations of the materials making up the sculpture and the square, Maya Schweizer guides the viewer around the square on film. Without the havoc wreaked by the Second World War, or the invention of the automobile, the peculiar overlapping of epochs and the parameters for organizing the space of this square would have certainly been very different. Here the period after 1945 is exemplary for the assault launched by postwar Modernism. It has resulted in an irreparable disfigurement that has since dominated this location and each of its composite parts, the monument, the synagogue, the bridge, and the church.
Brigitte Franzen

frieze

Kunstverein Langenhagen