Against Seeing

The project responds to a set of photographs found in a family archive that depict the aftermath of the bombing of Nitra by the Red Army in 1945. I question the meaning of further reproducing images of violence and human suffering. Instead of showing the photographs directly, I chose to work with their captions that refer to what these images represent. The project thus examines the limits of seeing and representation: what happens when the image of violence is replaced by language? The act of covering or withholding these photographs becomes, for me, a gesture of resistance against visual violence, as well as an attempt at their re-categorisation. The work opens up the question of how we can speak about historical trauma without visually exploiting it once again.