Browsing by Author "Washkansky, Dale"

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    Re-presenting historical trauma: art-making and the affective imagination
    (2025) Washkansky, Dale; Campbell, Kurt; Siopis, Penelope
    Starting with an inquiry into what I speculate to be a portrait family photograph from 1941 taken amidst one of Nazi Germany's mass murder operations in Liepāja, Latvia, I encounter a young girl who looks to the ground and hides her face. Due to this visual obfuscation I direct a plea for her to look up and meet my gaze. The question as to why this photograph was taken shortly before their execution looms large. My yearning to see the young girl's face and know more, coming to some understanding about the circumstances and the people therein, was the impetus to my artistic response – the work of imagining beyond the frame to explore its hauntingly grievous impact. By deploying certain strategies, art, I argue, can offer a novel means to reposition traumatic historical events outside the determinisms associated with conventional practices of historiography, which quell their disruptive temporality, so that they can enter the ambiguous realm of subjective inquiry, where they remain contingent, indeterminate, and open-ended. In search for strategies, I analyse a selection of artworks by Penny Siopis and Anton Kusters that respectively utilise the mediums of film and photography. I discuss how their artworks challenge conventional representations of historical traumas by rousing the forces of the imagination and affect so that each viewer becomes a participant within the indefinite process of making meaning. Crucial strategies that I identify include: activating the vibrant opacity of materiality, haptics, discontinuous narratives, and the dialectics of montage, all of which emphasise particularity, where the subjective imbricates with the historical, social, and cultural. I argue that these strategies demonstrate how the image is never fully formed or static for observational interpretation, but always relational and orientated towards an anterior future, engendering an encounter with heterogeneous, multidirectional time that problematises and disrupts causal chronological logic. Following which, by applying these strategies within my own artistic practice, I demonstrate how the plea, the original point of obfuscation, is thus transformed by my practice from a desire to see into a highly generative re-discovery of the photograph's affective relationality, thus arguing for art's capabilities to potentialise knowledge from un-knowing.
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    A space between : contemplating the post-Holocaust subject
    (2010) Washkansky, Dale; Josephy, Svea
    In 2008 I travelled, with camera in hand, to Germany in order to photograph the two concentration camps to Buchenwald and Ravensbrück. These are two of several camps that Germany established during the late 1930s to house so called undesirables or those believed to be enemies of the Reich. These people were not only extracted from society within Germany, but later from all occupied territories. European Jewry was the primary target of this policy. Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, but they were not the only victims. Approximately one and a half million Gypsies, at least 250 000 physically or mentally disabled people, three million Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Social Democrats, Communists, partisans, trade unionists and Polish intelligentsia were among those that fell victim to the Nazis. The Germany's concentration camps, these prisoners of the Reich were set to work under severe inhumane conditions as slave labour, which was also a means of torture, as efficient production was not the primary endeavour of these camps. It was only when war broke out that policy altered and the labour was utilised by German enterprises and to aid Germany's war effort. These camps formed part of a larger system that later sought to eventually annihilate these "enemies". There were also transit camps to those camps located towards the east, in Poland - the notorious death camps, where mass murder became harrowingly efficient.