Exhibitons

Torso – Memories for Tomorrow

13. 10. 2021 – 20. 2. 2022

Exhibition in the cooperation with Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague.

The House at the Black Madonna, 4th floor
Ovocný trh 19, Prague 1
Opening Hours: Tuesday 10 a.m.– 8 p.m., Wednesday – Sunday 10 a.m.– 6 pm, Monday closed
Metro line B – Náměstí Republiky station or Můstek station

The exhibition prologue is installed at the Bubny railway station, where 50,000 Prague citizens of Jewish origin embarked on their journey to ghettos and concentration camps. The exhibition is part of a series of events commemorating the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the deportations of Czech Jews.

The exhibition—organized in cooperation with the Memorial of Silence and the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague —pays tribute to the work of Pavel Dias, a key figure in Czech reportage and documentary photography. A native of Brno, he was a professor at the Secondary School of Applied Arts there, FAMU (the Film and TV school of the Academy of Performing Arts) in Prague (appointed Associate Professor in 1995, and Professor in 2004), and Tomas Bata University in Zlín. He and his camera visited— for an incredible thirty-two years—monuments built at concentration camps, original buildings, and newly established expositions.
Sharing the experience of the camps is a contradiction in terms. In fact, the impossibility of communicating the uncommunicable applies here more than perhaps anywhere else. Pavel Dias, whose grandfather had survived a concentration camp and who had lost part of his family in the Holocaust, was well aware of this fact. And yet, or perhaps precisely because of this, he yearned to explore this subject.
His photographs show places of memory, symbolic scenes, moments of reflection, joyous reunions, commemorative gatherings, and thematic exhibitions. We see buildings or the remains of buildings, indictments of human ruthlessness and cruelty, we share the inner worlds of survivors and "mere" visitors. Their inward-turned gazes are a symbol of something that cannot be communicated.
Over the course of his work, the series began to take on historical value. It shows the changing nature of these memorial gatherings, as relatively modest commemorations turned into mass actions recorded by multiple television crews. Political prisoners were joined by tourists and representatives of the Jewish or Romani communities. Survivors began to be accompanied by their children or grandchildren for whom their parents' or grandparents' stories were almost incomprehensible.
The author saw Torso as delivering not just an artistic but also a moral message. He was a strong believer in the power of the photographic image, but he definitely was well aware of its limitations as well. He understood the importance of memories for that which is still to come.
Today, it has been more than a quarter century since his last images from Torso, and so it is time to take an updated look at the entire series. Even the author himself understood the need to reevaluate a work after some time, unfortunately, he was not given the time to update Torso himself so that it might engage in a dialogue with the present day. The selection being presented here was thus made after his death, chosen from more than 5,000 images.

Pavel Dias died just a few days before the official establishment of the Memorial of Silence as a state-sponsored organization. The exhibition's message is about more than just the interplay between birth and death, however; it is about taking responsibility for the legacy of the grand stories of the Shoah, including the story of Dias's photographs and their return to a place of memory.
In our view, this unique collection of images is more than a valuable archive. Above all, it is a way of opening up important debate, a challenge to continue broad discussion of the legacy that we are calling The Shoah Within Us.

Pavel Štingl, director, Memorial of Silence

Curators: Lukáš Bártl & Jan Havel
Concept and idea: Pavel Štingl
Graphic design: Belavenir

Special thanks go to Marek Dias for agreeing to our new presentation of the cycle Torso from the estate of his father Pavel Dias.

The exhibition is held under the auspices of Minister of Culture Lubomír Zaorálek, Prague councilor for culture Helena Třeštíková, and Mayor of Prague 7 Jan Čižinský.