Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Holocaust Memorial.


This memorial to the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered in the holocaust, is located in the heart of the old Jewish quarter of Vienna in Judenplatz and is by the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread.
It is a steel and concrete construction formed from cast stacks of books, the spines facing inwards so their titles are hidden. Symbolic associations can be made with Judaism as a religion of books and also that the individual stories contained within the stacks can never be read. The memorial is discomforting, also slightly frustrating especially as the clearly apparent 'entrance' is in fact cast into the whole and cannot be opened.


No comments:

Post a Comment