The memory of the Second World War occupies a singular place in Europe’s cultural and intellectual landscape. More than a historical event, the war has become a foundational reference point through which questions of violence, responsibility, resistance, trauma, and reconciliation continue to be negotiated. Yet memory, as historians and theorists have long observed, is not a stable repository of facts. It is a dynamic, contested, and evolving process, shaped by institutions, narratives, generations, and cultural forms.
Thinkers such as Maurice Halbwachs have demonstrated that memory is fundamentally social, constructed within collective frameworks rather than preserved in isolation. Later scholars, including Pierre Nora, have drawn attention to the transformation of lived memory into lieux de mémoire, sites where memory is crystallised precisely because it is no longer organically transmitted. In the context of World War II, museums, memorials, archives, and commemorative rituals have become essential custodians of historical transmission, ensuring factual accuracy and ethical responsibility.
At the same time, historical scholarship, from Marc Bloch to Carlo Ginzburg, from microhistory to contemporary memory studies, has shown that the past cannot be reduced to a single narrative or perspective. History is plural, layered, and often fragmented. It is precisely within these tensions, between evidence and interpretation, between absence and presence, that contemporary art finds a productive space of intervention.
Art and the Limits of Representation
Art does not compete with history, nor does it seek to replace it. Rather, it operates in a different epistemological register. Where historiography strives for critical distance and methodological rigor, artistic practice engages with affect, intuition, and ambiguity. Art allows what Paul Ricoeur described as a “hermeneutics of memory”, a mode of understanding that acknowledges both the necessity of remembrance and its inherent incompleteness.
Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, artists have repeatedly returned to the legacy of war as a way of confronting loss, silence, and the limits of representation. From post-war abstraction and conceptual practices to contemporary installation, and participatory art, artistic responses to conflict have often focused less on depicting events than on addressing their afterlives: traces, ruins, absences, and inherited memories. In this sense, art becomes a space where historical time and present experience intersect.
However, this transition from history to contemporary art did not happen easily, as the subject matter is profoundly painful and the leap from written testimony to aesthetic form seemed insurmountable. The question arose very soon after the war and can be summed up as follows: can one create art after Auschwitz? The term is used here metaphorically to designate the Final Solution, even though the site itself represents only part of the historical reality of deportation, extermination, and the war more broadly. This initial interrogation was followed by another question, one that concerns us more directly here: can one create art with Auschwitz? We recall the debate sparked by the exhibition Mémoire des camps, which raised the issue of using historical photographs of the camps within contemporary artworks. Over the decades, contemporary art has established itself as a possible response, and it has even become a desirable one, particularly as the generation of witnesses disappears and we move from a living, historical memory to a cultural memory.
The project’s artists have been able to work within a path already opened by their predecessors, such as Anselm Kiefer, Zoran Mušič, or Miroslaw Balka. Ultimately, contemporary art serves the historical narrative by offering an essential contribution: by bringing the artist’s sensitivity and perspective, it respects the sites, the sources, and the witnesses. From this principle, the conceptual and material horizon expands considerably, making use of contemporary media such as video and, above all, combining them in an alchemy that the visitor ultimately experiences as natural.
As the decades passed, contemporary art established itself as a possible response, and even a necessary one, in the face of the disappearance of the generation of witnesses, at this crucial moment of transition from historical memory to cultural memory.
Ultimately, contemporary art serves the historical narrative by making an essential contribution, provided that, while enveloping it in the artist’s sensitivity and perspective, it respects the sites, the sources, and the witnesses. Starting from this premise, the conceptual and material horizon expands considerably, through the use of contemporary media such as video and, above all, by combining them in an alchemy that visitors will ultimately experience as natural.
At the Sites: Art of Remembrance
Art of Remembrance situates itself within this lineage. The exhibition emerges from a conviction that remembrance sites are not only places of preservation, but also spaces of dialogue, capable of hosting new forms of interpretation without compromising historical integrity. By inviting artists into four distinct sites of World War II memory, the project proposes a model of engagement rooted in immersion, research, and encounter.
The residencies at the Sybir Memorial Museum, La Coupole, the Nuto Revelli Foundation in Paraloup, and Bastogne offered artists access not only to archives and collections, but also to landscapes, testimonies, and local narratives. Each site carries its own historical specificity (among others; deportation, occupation, resistance, liberation), yet together they form a constellation of experiences that reflect the complexity of Europe’s wartime past.
The works presented in this catalogue do not seek to illustrate history or to offer didactic conclusions. Instead, they function as interpretive acts, translations of historical material into contemporary visual, spatial, and conceptual languages. They invite viewers to reflect on what remains visible and what has disappeared, on how memory is transmitted across generations, and on the role of art in sustaining ethical engagement with the past. In bringing together contemporary artistic practices and sites of historical remembrance, Art of Remembrance affirms that memory is not only something to be safeguarded, but something to be continually re-examined. It is in this ongoing process, between history and art, knowledge and experience, that remembrance remains alive.
