From one genocide to another
The exhibition, “The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim”, was planned to be opened on 7 April 2020 at the Holocaust and Genocide Center in Johannesburg. However, after Covid 19 things went differently. But such an exhibition is a powerful reminder of the dangers facing humanity.
The exhibition features 100 portraits of the victims of the genocide in Rwanda through their belongings recovered and extracted from the mass graves of the village of Kabuga in 2018, 25 years after the genocide. In total, the remains of more than 84,000 people have been found at the site as a tribute to the nearly 1 million people who were murdered.
These portraits were represented by Barry Salzman. He was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in South Africa and then emigrated to the United States.
” We were ” is a text that reflects the photographer’s experience when he took these images of those who were never identified. It is possible, for example, to imagine the life of this little boy wearing his backpack with a dog figure on it. During this work, the artist thought back to the words of Georges Didi-Huberman, “do not invoke the unimaginable, but instead force us into this place that is difficult to imagine”.
Be the first to comment