Yishay Garbasz retraced his mother’s early life during the World War II and the Holocaust to document what he saw for the project: “In my mother’s footsteps.” Jim Messenger reports.


An exhibition which challenges the viewer to look and ‘really see’ has recently completed its run at CMU’s Art Gallery in Chiang Mai. On its way to the National Museum in Bangkok, this visual delight explores both inner and outer spaces, within us and around us.


Yishay Garbasz is a polyvalent kind of a guy who blends his artwork to fit the gallery he is in and includes the space of the gallery itself in the final realization of the exhibition.


It’s really working on three different levels at once. You have the art and how it wants to be shown. You have the space, which has it own way of being, and finally you have the joining of the two at a certain time, which creates a third reality, a kind of “Glass Bead Game”.


You may be familiar with the literary works of Hermann Hesse (‘Siddartha’, ‘Steppenwolf’ , ‘Narcissus and Goldmun’, ‘Journey to the East’ etc). He used to be a favourite of mine; when I was much younger I’d read this Germans author’s works and wonder at the deep meaning hidden within.


I was very precocious, precious, and fond of myself. Hermann Hesse had the ticket: German writer of a semimystical bent, like his counterpart Thomas Mann (‘The Magic Mountain’, ‘Doctor Fastus’, ‘Joseph and his Brothers’), who fused an obsession with Eastern mystical thought, Theosophy and the ideals of Communism as a counter point to the rise of Nazism and the imperial dreams of a shattered empire.


These giants of literature represent the European mind, its concept of reality, how content from different times and places filter in to our inner cosmos and influence how we think and interact. So Yishay, in himself, represents the percolation of European thought, its distillation through war, disease and the final solution proposed by the Nazis to eliminate all nonpure beings. He engenders the life force of all Jewish people who went through the Holocaust and were transformed in the crucible of the times. His journey of photos are ‘memories mortes’ (still lives), the written record of his Mother’s personal journey through hell, put down after she somehow miraculously survived the concentration camps. This memory, this matriarchal record passed down to Yishay, represents the essence of humanity; what makes us tick as human beings, what make us laugh and cry, what brings joy and sorrow.


His pictures are also stills of the present: scenes from rooms now occupied by different people, scenes of trees and mountains, train tracks and abandoned munitions factories, things seen along the way, experienced in a different context, a different time. Thus the past becomes the present and the present engenders the past.


Who can really understand such horror (of the Holocaust, that was really only a bit player in the greater horror and drama of the Second World War), unless one has experienced it? It goes beyond the pale of human understanding that people can treat others thus. And yet it happened. It goes on today, as recently as Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Yugoslavia, or presently in a string of African countries where genocide has been for a long time the continuing norm. This is not to exclude many far and not so far away places where small incidents of human barbarism continue to be carried out in the name of one cause or another.


Mr Garbarz’s pictures go the heart of the matter, recreating memories of desolation and despair in his oh so pretty renditions of hallways, living rooms and such, filled with the mundane detrius of present day living; highlighted by the patience of a highly trained hunter who waits for just the right light, just the right combinations of factors to capture that moment on film. Of course he doesn’t make matters easy for himself by toting round this massive wooden camera with separately framed negatives that have to be painstakingly inserted, taken out, stored, all in a backbreaking and frustrating process that would try the patience of many. Add to this the need to reconceptualize the method of presentation, gallery to gallery, then you begin to understand that there is an artist at work here!


In the Chiang Mai show, Mr Garbarz was presented with a massive factory space with impossibly high ceilings, questionable lighting; two rooms in one really, one imbedded in the other slightly indented, two steps lower. Round it the other room ‘circled’, held its breath and waited. What to do? Most people encountering such uninviting potential, cringe and succumb to conformity, placing spaces with pictures here and there. It’s not an easy space to fill. It does not invite one to dance. It rather precludes any attempt to ‘warm it up’ make it more ‘cosy’ or ‘people friendly.’ So what this particular artist did was to feel the space in relationship to the story unfolding in the lay of the pictures and tried to mold one to the other.


What he did finally was create a kind of elliptical causeway of fishing wire that courses through the whole space. From this he suspended his photos and his mother’s written memory pieces from her Holocaust experience. So the viewer is invited to walk the silent way through this maze of wire and experience for herself the days of mundane numbing terror and unspeakable horror.


And yet Mr Garbarz’s photos show nothing of the kind. They represent ordinary scenes of life, room interiors, walls of buildings, street corners. Each photo has it’s own stillness. It’s not a waiting stillness, but one in which the photographer has taken out time. That Zen moment, that perfect moment, when light touches the scene in a particular way, when all is still and for one moment only, time itself stands still; then and only then is the the image captured.


If this were all to the art, then one could say: “Oh, very nice, very nice.” When juxtaposed with his mother’s words and laid out in this elliptical highway with wires running ceiling to floor they become incandescent fire, burning the inside of eyelids, scorching trails down to the very essence of one’s being.


This transmuting, one level of meaning to the other, this inclusion of the exhibition space itself in the final outcome of the presentation, layer upon layer turns good art into great. []