4-channel video installation by Joan Grossman at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland, Nov. 2002-Jan. 2003.  A project in collaboration with visual artist, Jadwiga Sawicka (wall text and photography).

The piece started with a search for my grandfather’s hometown in Eastern Poland, and became a journey through landscape, time and the limits of memory. Recorded in the region’s most violently traumatic sites, the video observes the disappearance of history in places that are now overgrown, bland and ordinary. And still there are the unexpected jolts of recognition, nostalgia, horror and familiarity.

Shot at Treblinka concentration camp;  Europe’s only remaining primordial forest on the border with Belarus where partisan fighters have hidden for centuries; the site of the former Warsaw Jewish ghetto; and locations in and around my grandfather’s hometown, Sokolow-Podlaski, which was on the front lines of the German-Russian fighting of WWII and rebuilt under Soviet Communism. 

Cited as one of Poland’s best exhibitions in 2002.

(translated page - beware of grammar)