TEXT READ:

A new bit of graffiti appeared on the tow path on the leafy south bank of the Thames. The large white block capitals were neatly painted on the top of the low wall that divides the lower pathway from the upper one, from where the bank slants steeply down to the river. The deliberate writing included the declaration “the Holocaust is a lie”.

J, now aged 82 and living in London since the 50’s, came across this on his daily walk.  Returning with a bucket of soapy water and a scrubbing brush, he managed with difficulty to remove enough of the paint to make the writing illegible. 

128 X 96cm Lamdachrome print mounted on aluminium framed in a perspex box. The above text was shown on the gallery wall adjacent to the photograph. For its showing at Glassyard in Budapest this text was translated into Hungarian.

NOTE: The J that features in the text is the same J as features in The Donkey Field. The grid that sits over the image comes from the ground glass on the back of a large format camera.

Roaul Wallenberg was the Swedish Diplomat whose actions in issuing ‘passports’ and setting up safehouses in Budapest saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews in 1944, J and his parents among them.

The photographs record the site of the Wallenberg summer house where Raoul grew up until the age of 12. The house burned down under mysterious circumstances in 1933 the year of the beginning of Hitlers Third Reich. Suspected by Russia of being involved covert action against occupation, Wallenberg disappeared in 1947 and was never seen again.

In the repeated visits necessary to execute the work the bucolic Scandinavian landscape became shadowed by the association with a dark episode of European history and the tragic events seen in Hungary in the last year of the war. This mapping of one time and place onto another and the relationship between Wallenberg’s and J’s boyhood lives informed the binary form used.

Exhibitions of works on this page took place at :
The Donkey Field was shown at Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London 1 Oct – 13 Nov 2021
GLASSYARD Gallery, Budapest 11 November 2021 – 21 January 2022

Review of exhibition at Danielle Arnaud by Martin Herbert Art Monthly No 442 December 2022
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