Pouch for Silence

The current exhibition reveal very important features of the works of both artists, but also indicate their distinctiveness. First of all, despite the difference in generation and artistic circles in which their attitudes were shaped, both artists created in the shadow of the family experience of the Holocaust. Different forms of memory, from dreams and memories to its forms materialized in the form of destruction, such as destroyed or worn out things, are the basic thing for their work. Krystiana Robb-Narbutt likes to use garbage with a high symbolic saturation, such as various devotional objects or objects evoking strong associations, such as old crowded children's toys. In Robb-Narbutt's work we find ourselves in the beautified world of the dead, in a cemetery full of signs and symbols, in the face of the tragedy of unattainable memories and distant memory.
 
Erna Rosenstein avoids this type of activity, she chooses rather old, used tickets, postage stamps, small coins, shreds of paper. In Rosenstein's case, the affirmation of life prevails over tragedies, memory is supposed to support the future. Life, from embryonic forms to the most complex ones, is an independent element indifferent to individual experiences. It hides its suffering in a memorable moon, in copied images of its parents, in memories and emotions transferred to paper. He collects everything under his eyelids, images and poems.
 
The two artists share the same goal: to submit to the used materials and former events, to give them a "voice", to extract from them a potentially entrenched expression. They both face the impossible.