Z8619, Glasgow, 2011

I recently took some photographs at an exhibiton where my son Omar had some work displayed. The room was very dimly lit, so I bumped up the ISO to 2500 and this picture was handheld at 1/10s. The Image-stabilised lens certainly helped. The main part of Omar’s work was a powerful painting which he called ‘Z8619’. The farmer at whose farm I have spent many hours photographing swallows donated the rusty barbed wire! I will let Omar tell you more about the work:

 

“As part of the Document 9 International Human Rights Film Festival I created this large-scale painting which I then wrapped in barbed wire. It was in response to the research I have been carrying out into the suffering of the Romani People at the hands of the Nazis and their affiliates. I presented the painting next to the poem below by Radnóti. Though he was not actually of Romani extraction himself - but rather a Hungarian Jew - I feel that his writing is some of the most poignant to come form those dark days of WW2 - His last poems were discovered in a little notebook in his pocket when his body was exhumed from a mass-grave. Read some of his translated verse and about this most remarkable man www.thehypertexts.com/Mikl%C3%B3s_Radn%C3%B3ti_Hungarian_....

 

Postcard 1

by Miklós Radnóti

translated by Michael R. Burch

 

Out of Bulgaria, the great wild roar of the artillery thunders,

resounds on the mountain ridges, rebounds, then ebbs into silence

while here men, beasts, wagons and imagination all steadily increase;

the road whinnies and bucks, neighing; the maned sky gallops;

and you are eternally with me, love, amid all the chaos,

glowing within my conscience — incandescent, intense.

Somewhere within me, dear, you abide forever —

still, motionless, silent, like an angel stunned to complacence by death

or an insect inhabiting the heart of a rotting tree.

 

I thought it immoral to put up Z8619 for sale so instead I am going to donate it to the Anne Frank Trust.

 

NEVER AGAIN 卐 “

 

Done