Afternoon Talk: In Search of Amnesia Artist Talk with Barry Falk

The Wiener Holocaust Library is pleased to host artist Barry Falk for an afternoon talk about his book .

In Search of Amnesia is a documentary project looking into the Jewish narrative in Poland and Ukraine. The project is concerned with how memory is held in places that suffered atrocity and immense loss. The word ‘amnesia’ refers to repressed memories. The images Falk presents occupy the push-pull between the horror and the wish to rectify history.

Retracing the history of the Jewish narrative in Eastern Europe, Falk traced both his own personal family history and the collective loss. He photographed the remembered, the honoured, the erased and the reimagined. In this talk, he will discuss his research project which began in 2017 and the book that emerged from it.

Barry Falk is a UK based photographer exploring a range of subjects related to the psychological sense of self. He has documented places that have undergone collective trauma, focussing in particular on Eastern Europe to consider his own personal history and explore how certain locations hold collective loss related to the Jewish narrative of loss. He has exhibited within the UK and Europe, been featured in a wide range of photographic magazines, given interviews and public talks about his work and been a selected artist for the Portrait of Britain 2020.

He has recently published his first book: In Search of Amnesia, published by Kehrer Verlag Publishers, Heidelberg, Germany, which was featured in Der Stern magazine: ‘Where the Horrors of the Holocaust Still Hurt Today’ and featured as part of an Arte documentary looking into ‘Transgenerational Trauma’.

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Host or Publisher The Wiener Holocaust Library