Solidarność

There must be as many works of art on the horrors humanity has endured as there are horrors. More, one might think, but our ever-evolving human history suggests otherwise — or, rather, a certain practice of that discipline, which excavates ever-deeper layers of unwelcome truths and insists on their recognition. To insist in this way — to witness — belongs as much to the artist as the historian.

There is, too, no shortage of thought on the aesthetics of atrocity, which is to say that Jehanne Dubrow’s step into this space is as brave as it is bold. In Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity, Dubrow grapples with questions canonized by philosophers, writers, and poets before her — Theodore Adorno, Susan Sontag, Paul Celan, to name but the most obvious few.

Dubrow brings those questions into the everyday, tactile world. A child of diplomats, she was the only Jewish student in her Polish secondary school; her mother interviewed refugees from the Bosnian genocide. How people narrate atrocity — in linear stories, in visual arts, in embodied memory — was no