EXHIBITION
Opening: Fri. 09/30/22, 7:00 p.m
Herzogsburg Braunau
09/30 – 23.12.22
How can past injustice be made visible ?
Contribution to the exhibition: Katharina Mayrhofer in cooperation with Helen Emily Davy and Diana Jellinek
The visual artists Katharina Mayrhofer and Helen E. Davy, a descendant of the Wertheimer family, experience the meaningful and mediating function of restitution through memory work based on a table found by chance. The table, which once belonged to the Wertheimer family and comes from Gut Ranshofen, was unlawfully stolen by Mayrhofer’s ancestors during the National Socialist era. The artistic work becomes the lever for the joint reconstruction of identity.
An event organized by the Association for Contemporary History with the Braunau Museum Association.
www.zeitgeschichte-braunau.at/programm/
360 degree virtual Tour of the exhibition
The table that doesn`t belong to us.
An attempt to give back using the Wertheimer family as an example
The starting point for the following work is a black table that came into the possesion of my family in the course of the “wild Aryanizations” between 1938-1945. Oral tradition and fact-based evidence show that it originally came from Ranshofen and belonged to the former landowners, the Wertheimer family.
In the search for answers to the questions of who stole the table and how it ended up hidden in the attic of an inn for many decades, I came across a previously unknown, dark chapter of family history.
Since then I have been asking myself: How do you deal with Nazi looted property in family ownership ?
This artistic-scientific work should be an impetus to develop an awarness of injustice about stolen objects in one`s own family posession and encourage an unbureaucratic return to the original owners family, if possible. Based on this exploration of the subject, I will show that this discourse is of public importance.
Katharina Mayrhofer