Double Wall of Silence

“The starting point of the group exhibition “Double Wall of Silence” is a field of tension between the spoken and the unspoken, between the muted and the forgotten, between the individual and the collective. Migration as a dominant theme in recent years has sparked discussions about national borders, refugees, minorities, loss of identity, about them and us, danger and trauma. The power of recording experiences and memories poses a question of the forms of narrative – who is the speaker and who is the listener? How much time – and silence – does it take for the speaker’s place to belong to the nameless, and how much for the listener, even if it is an unwanted testimony, to be able to fully hear it? When is dialogue possible at all, and what happens if what is said remains unheard? Through a selection of works by four artists who explore or play with the presence and absence, existence and non-existence, the exhibition focuses on the silenced and the power of the unspoken; on silence as a form of language and narrative.” – excerpt from the curatorial text

Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On, in his work Legacy of Silence (1994)*, analyses in detail the phrase “the double wall of silence” in relation to the history of the Holocaust. Recently linguist Aleida Assmann updated the term;** her writing also marked the making-of the exhibition.

*Dan Bar On, Legacy of Silence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
**Aleida Assmann, “Silence as the Form of Language”, in: Aslan Gaisumov: Keicheyuhea (Sternberg Press, 2019).