Bracha L. Ettinger

Bracha L. Ettinger works through a past she unknowingly inherited in transgenerational transmission by transforming a selection of archival images of world wars and genocide using a new medium she developed - an interrupted photocopying process. As a result, her works on papers bear only a ghostly trace ‘in ash’ of rare photographic documents of scenes of mass murder during the Shoah whose newly created surface she then touches in her present with a colour-ladened brush to ‘clothe’ the traumatic freight of the image and the past with wit(h)ness and fascinance - her terms for a prolonged compassionate re-gazing and openness to being with, and refusing to abandon, the pain of the past. HackelBury will show Matrix Borderline Case no.3 (1990) and the trilogy Nichsapha (Yearning) - Lapsus (1991). Fragmentary papers from the interrupted photocopy process are assembled into glass-mounted standing ‘figures’, which cast their imageless shadow upon the wall. One ‘document’ to which Ettinger has repeatedly returned, is a rare record of one mass murder of women and children in Ukraine, under German occupation in 1942, painfully resonating with the violence against women and children occurring worldwide, in war and in Ukraine today. Ettinger writes: ‘Art not only evokes memory but it creates memory for the future’.