Scars of Memory
The Soviet and Nazi occupations of 1940–1944 destroyed the Lithuanian state and claimed the lives of approximately one million of its inhabitants. The mass deportations of Lithuania’s population and the large-scale murder of Jews are receding into the past, yet the scars of memory remain. In a society where historical traumas unfolded one after another, the silence of the first generation is giving way to later generations’ search for identity and meaning, their efforts to piece together surviving fragments of information, and to question erasures and omissions, thereby forging their own connection with the past.
This exhibition, dedicated to the destruction of Lithuania’s population during the war and post-war years, presents works by contemporary Lithuanian artists. Drawing on sources related to these painful historical events, the artists reinterpret them and remind visitors of this tragic era through the voice of a generation that did not experience the repressions directly, but has nevertheless been shaped by collective memory and its fractures.
The work by Gintarė Valevičiūtė-Brazauskienė and Antanas Skučas, inspired by the memoirs of deportee Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, transports viewers to the winter of 1942–1943 beyond the Arctic Circle. Against the backdrop of the harsh Arctic landscape stands a human being striving to remain human in a place where they should never have had to be.
Archival photographs of Lithuanian Jewish children, printed by Dovilė Dagienė using a special process involving plant leaves, may be the only surviving witnesses to the life stories of their subjects. The viewer’s gaze, thoughts, and emotional response offer these stories an opportunity to return, if only briefly, to living memory.
The works on display reveal several layers of understanding the era of loss. The artists’ unique perspective, imbued with moments of everyday life, allows us to engage more deeply with experiences at the limits of human endurance, gives them meaning, and suggests ways of confronting the collective historical trauma passed down from generation to generation.