Slovakia – a country that will not forget. A joint exhibition of photographer Maň Štrauch and artist Milan Lukáč
There are photographs, images or memories that are tied to the beautiful thing we have experienced, what we like to remember. However, there are also those who do not relate to our personal experiences or experiences with our loved ones, but they cannot hit us deeply. It mainly shows people who allow us to limit the generation, but allow affordability, allow us to learn about our common history through specific destinies or realize what we can never forget. Such are the portraits of Holocaust survivors captured through the lens of photographer Maň Štrauch and the artwork of sculptor and painter Milan Lukáč. The unique works of both artists bring us closer to the fates of people who survived the persecution, concentration camps, the painful loss of their loved ones, but they are also not important evidence of our common memory and unwavering desire to live.
The author of exceptional portraits Maňo Štrauch, multiple winner of SLOVAK PRESS PHOTO, left his comfortable news zone in the economic weekly and photographed Holocaust survivors in the Ohel David senior social facility of the Central Union of Jewish Religious Communities in the Slovak Republic. It is here that even the last memorials of events spend time together, which may not seem so automatically to us, who did not experience the Second World War and its games. Try their meeting are touching photos full of emotions.
Together with photographs by Maň Štrauch, he forms a current exhibition of works by sculptor and painter Milan Lukáč, who is a representative of Slovak fine art. In addition to countless monumental and chamber sculptures, paintings and graphics, his works include important sculptural objects throughout Slovakia, such as the Holocaust Memorial in Bratislava, the Memorial to Political Prisoners in Žilina or the Iron Curtain Memorial at the confluence of the Morava and Danube rivers below Devín Castle. unveiled in 2008 by Queen Elizabeth II.
On September 9, 2021, 80 years have passed since the issue of the so-called Jewish Code, an order of the Government of the Slovak State (1939-1945), which deprived Jewish citizens not only of property, but also of basic human and civil rights and dignity. The tragic journey of about 70,000 Jewish citizens of the Slovak state began in work and concentration camps and concentration centers at Bratislava Patrónka, Sered, Nováky, Žilina or Poprad and culminated in the Nazi extermination camps of Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Today, about a handful of Holocaust survivors live in Slovakia. September 9 is commemorated by the Slovak Republic as a memorial Day for the Victims of the Holocaust and Racial Violence. The exhibition, created in collaboration with the Museum of Jewish Culture in Bratislava and the Museum of the Holocaust in Sered, is an opportunity to recall not only this tragic chapter of our history, but above all to remember specific human destinies, the memory of those who never returned, the heroism of those who they also survived those who gave them a helping hand.
Exhibition Maňo Štrauch – Milan Lukáč: A Landscape That Does Not Forget 1941 – 2021 will last in the SPP Gallery, Mlynské nivy 44 / c, until October 29, 2021 Monday – Friday from 10.00 to 18.00 h [email protected]