All Flesh is Grass: A Post-Memorial

Canadian artists Angela Henderson and Solomon Nagler continue their collaboration with Polish artists Alexandra Janus and Aleksander Schwarz to present a site-specific intervention that maps the unmarked graves of Jewish victims of the Holocaust into an architectural space within sight of Elpaqkwitk (Georges Island). Using installation, photo-based works, print-making and sculpture as forms of experimental mapping, these works are a continuation of their artistic research within the forested landscapes of Eastern Poland. At Pier 21, this work intervenes in a national museum that memorializes settler immigration on Turtle Island, contextualizing the Shoah within a space of difficult history.

 

When presenting our research on the Shoah, we acknowledge the territory and space that we are in, and our implication as uninvited guests in Miꞌkmaꞌki. As a post-memorial, we strive to explore the inter-relationship between memory, witnessing and institutional inertia. Here, we have created an exhibition in an interstitial space - a hallway in this case - traditionally not used for exhibition at Pier 21, to explore this work as an unsettling juxtaposition. 

 

כָּל־הַבָּשָׂ֣ר חָצִ֔יר ​​ (All flesh is Grass) is an oft quoted biblical verse that refers to humanity’s fragility and the connection between ecology and divinity. In the context of this exhibition, our land-based research practices are informed both by non-anthropocentric agents and fragments of human interventions. Our collaborations with the Zapomniane Foundation in Poland explore how the remnants of these past tragedies have been imprinted on nature and, how commemorations of sites of difficult history serve to acknowledge these sites of genocide .