Jenny Stolzenberg: Forgive and do not Forget

Sunday 25th January to Sunday 14th March 2004

The celebrated ceramicist Jenny Stolzenberg has her first solo show at the Ben Uri with row upon row of almost two hundred pairs of glazed and fired ceramic shoes, evoking those clusters of footwear left behind by the victims of the Holocaust when the camps were liberated. Timed to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day in early 2004, the show will be a beautiful and poignant memorial to the victims and their families. Smaller versions of Forgive and do not Forget have been seen in various venues over recent years, to great acclaim.

Stolzenberg studies the footwear worn in mainland Europe during the nineteen-thirties and early nineteen-forties in meticulous detail, including regular periods of research at such institutions as the Victoria & Albert Museum, to make her ceramic shoes as accurate as possible. They are haunting replicas of footwear worn during the Third Reich by Europe’s innocent civilians – Jews and non-Jews alike – and were often the only material witness and evidence left behind by their existence, from babies to the very old, when the camps were liberated. 

One of Jenny’s main inspirations for the project that has preoccupied her over the last few years is a quotation taken from Anne Michael’s elegiac novel, Fugitive Pieces: “I imagined that if each pair of shoes could be named, they could be brought back to life.” Jenny says of Forgive and do not Forget: “Shoes are so evocative. I imagine everyone remembers their very first pair – the style, the colour, and the pride with which they wore them. Shoes can tell us so much about the owner… Why did I make my shoes? Why did I choose to spend more than a year working on this subject? My father survived Dachau and Buchenwald. He died 13 years ago. The time had eventually arrived for me when I felt ready to explore my legacy as a child of a survivor – what it meant to me and how it had affected my life.”

For more information, please contact Richard on 0207 604 3991 or at richard@benuri.org.uk