Exhibition: Faces in the Void, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, until February 14 2010
As the daughter of German Jewish refugees, photographer Marion Davies was prepared for an emotionally painful trip when she travelled to Berlin to photograph memorials from the Holocaust.
The portraits she returned with – destroyed trees in Nazi sterilisation camps, burnt holy parchments and shattered sculptures still standing as anti-persecution symbols of the Second World War – has formed a hugely important touring exhibition for previous Holocaust Memorial Days.
This show at the Herbert travels to another Eastern European country, the Czech Republic, to piece together artefacts pointing to the impact of the Holocaust in that country.
© Marion Davies
A joint project carried out by Davies and award-winning poet Jane Liddell-King between 2006 and 2007, Faces in the Void sought out survivors in the town of Pardubice, linking them with scrolls from looted synagogues still dotted around eastern Europe.
It also connected them with England by tracing a Jewish Torah scroll from the Alteneushul, in Nazi-occupied Prague, to a safer home in Cambridge.
One of the oldest synagogues in Europe, the Alteneushul dates to the late 13th century, and the immensely atmospheric gothic architecture of the building is captured in large-scale views of its interior taken by Davies, alongside ghostly colour photographs of the surrounding streets.
Jane Liddell-King and Marion Davies discuss the exhibition and Coventry's connection with the town of Lidice in a talk on Thursday (February 28) at 12.30pm. Call 024 7683 2386 for more details.
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