Artist’s piece commemorating the holocaust draws hefty criticism from survivors and their families.
With more than one million people killed at its concentration camp, Auschwitz serves as the most powerful reminder of World War II’s wanton slaughter.
On Wednesday, Copenhagen City Council held its commemoration of ‘Auschwitz Day’, an event that pays homage to those who died at the camp and their descendants, with the theme ‘Farlige forstillinger’ (‘Dangerous exhibitions’).
The event included open discussions with photographer Jacob Holdt, films about suppression and genocide, such as ‘Hotel Rwanda’, and – not least – ‘Rolexgate’, a small model of the Auschwitz concentration camp created by Danish/Chilean artist Marco Evaristti, displayed at Nikolaj Plads square.
A proportion of the model’s materials come from gold teeth fillings of the camp’s prisoners, which included Evaristti’s own grandmother. It also includes a train car made of diamonds, while a Rolex watch showing the time a five minutes to 12 adorning the model’s entrance.
The exhibit was first displayed in late October at a gallery in Berlin, where it created such a furore that it was removed after just a few hours.
Evaristti said the exhibit wasn’t just a reminder of the death associated with the Holocaust, but also of the looting the Nazis conducted. He said he bought the teeth from an Austrian man a couple of years ago.
‘I had to appear to him to be a Nazi myself,’ said the artist. ‘I disguised myself and cut my hair very short’.
But not everyone believes Evaristti’s exhibit – or the city council’s event on the whole – is a proper expression of remembrance.
‘The Holocaust was a gravely serious event, a genocide that just decades ago cost millions of people their lives,’ wrote Tom Hermansen, art critic for Jyllands-Posten newspaper.
‘Evaristti’s model is unpleasant to me because it uses extremely sensitive material from the Nazi’s victims, whose family members are still living. By building an Auschwitz model in gold from the teeth of dead Jews, in my opinion he’s saying that the Jewish people themselves were responsible for the Holocaust,’ Hermansen argued.
Another article in the newspaper, attributed to Jutland-based vicar Uffe Westergaard Pedersen, also expressed concern that the city’s event was off the mark.
‘You shouldn’t publicise a people’s suffering through a pop-smart commemoration,’ his article states.
But deputy mayor Pia Allerslev, head of the city’s culture administration, defended the city’s take on Auschwitz Day.
‘We’re questioning the ethical challenges connected with the information disseminated about the Holocaust and World War II,’ she said.
‘We realise that this exhibit might offend some people, but a work of art should be allowed to do that. For me it’s important that we never forget what happened, and so we need to turn to things such as art to get us to reflect over the actions committed during the Holocaust,’ Allerslev said.
Evaristti himself argued the exhibit was not designed to offend anyone, but rather provoke thought. He said people often looked at the work as just an object and never thought about the symbolism behind it.
‘If you know what the model’s all about, then you should react positively to it,’ he told The Copenhagen Post.
‘But I can’t say for certain whether I’d have created it if I didn’t have Jewish blood myself or if my grandmother hadn’t been a concentration camp survivor,’ he added. ‘I really can’t answer that question, although my gut instinct is to say “of course”, because I’ve done works about Muslims and other groups’.
‘But I’m just glad I was able to buy those gold teeth myself, rather than them ending up in the hands of Nazis’.
The Copenhagem Post
