Greek Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, a pictorial narrative.

Greek Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, a pictorial narrative.

The Cervantes Institute and the Jewish Museum of Greece introduce a series of photographs - portraits of Greek Jewish survivors of the Nazi camps. These persons, now registered in the history of the Second World War, unfold their memory in front of a lens. Since 2012, the artist Artemis Alcalay investigates, travels in Greece and abroad and talks with the survivors of –before the war- flourishing Jewish communities. Building a bridge between historical documentary and art she combines, in the same shot, the man with her own work from the series “Home: a wandering”. The archetypal figure of house-home, a place of joy which manifests happiness and family warmth, recalls memories and starts a fruitful dialogue between past and present, wound and healing, speech and silence. In Cervantes, for the first time Sephardic portraits with Spanish nationality and documents from Thessaloniki and Athens are exposed which survived thanks to the efforts of the Spanish consul in Athens, Sebastián Romero de Radigales. Radigales risked his career to save them from certain death in the Nazi camps by issuing new passports and putting pressure for safe transport from the Bergen-Belsen camp to Spain.
The exhibition is accompanied by photographs of documents: citizenship certificates, correspondence, survivors’ passports with Spanish citizenship, as well as books written by survivors in various languages. Artemis Alcalay was born in Athens in 1957. She studied painting, set design and art history at the School of Fine Arts with D. Mytaras, G. Moralis, B. Vassiliadis. M. Lambraki-Plaka. She did postgraduate studies in Studio Art at New York University. At the same university she studied photography with Gerry Pryor and in Athens by Laura Dodson and Camillo Nola. She also studied weaving with Maria Leonidas. She exhibits in Greece and abroad and her work can be found both in public and private collections in Greece and other countries.
Opening: 1.20.2016, 19.30.
Exposure Duration: until 03.19.2016. Exhibition Hall of the Cervantes Institute of Athens, Mitropoleos 23.
Free admission.
Hours: Monday to Friday: 10.00-21.00. Saturday: 10.00-14.00. Closed: Sundays and 03/14/2016.