Artist Statement

About the Artist

Edward Hillel was born in Baghdad, grew up in Montreal, and now lives in Paris, New York and Montreal. His multidisciplinary work -- which includes photography, video, audio, text, objects and installations, is widely exhibited and published. Most recently, Hillel has explored the relationship between art, politics, history and memory in his work, evoking seminal events such as genocide, the movement of refugees, unemployment, globalism and regionalism. He was recently awarded the 51st German Critics Association Visual Arts Prize.

In awarding the prize, the jury stated: "... Edward Hillel questions the way historical events manifest themselves in individual and collective memory. How do authenticity and re-interpretation relate to each other? What kinds of insecurities and losses result? His work is about fragments and breaks, about time leaps and distances that cannot be overcome, contradictions that cannot be reconciled. His impressive multimedia installations and projections heighten our awareness for overtones, revealing conditions of perception through the uses of photographic and audio-visual art, through digital technologies and conventional techniques. Edward Hillel, however, does not aim at simulation and identification, but at distance and reflection. This entails a critical analysis of his own artistic means and media."

The artist lectures widely about his work, and offers seminars and workshops on issues relating to the Holocaust, Art & Memory.

News Release - Edward Hillel Awarded Québec Studio In New York

Artist Statement

My interest in the Holocaust was triggered when I moved to France in 1990. I was struck by Europe's silence and confused response to commemorations and memorialization of the shoah; and the traumatized panic surrounding current far-right ideologies (Le Pen, Haider, skinheads) and ongoing genocides (Rwanda, Somalia, Yugoslavia). While a new and optimistic European Union was begging to finally bury its collective nightmare as the shoah's 50th anniversary approached, contemporary events kept bringing it back to the surface. I began to understand the Holocaust as a continuum with a past, present and future - a living active memory of testimonies, events, archives and archetypes providing lessons and inspiration to mankind. I use this memory pool to create works sometimes called art.

The challenge to every artist using the tragedies of history and memory in their work is to locate his place vis-a-vis the facts; for in addition to our desire to create lasting, autonomous works of art that instruct and inspire, we have a responsibility to the dead, to all those victims of genocide. Our activity, our work, is a kind of incantation, a Kaddish or a prayer of remembrance.

As I get further into this body of work, it seems that the more I learn and the more I know, the less I am able to express or tell others. That is, the disparity keeps growing between what is lived and profoundly experienced on the one hand, and what can be expressed using all the scientific, artistic, intellectual and technological means we have at our disposal. This may have to do with our collective need to lay to rest and mourn our dead, to give them a proper burial, which, in the case of genocide, we can never completely mourn, and therefore set ourselves free. It seems that our desire as artists to create, to be witness, is constantly overcome by a fundamental need as men and women to mourn our fellow humans. And it is precisely from this act of collective mourning that understanding, illumination, and revelation arises. It is in their meaningless deaths that we, the living, find the strength to reach for a better, more just and humane world.

To begin work on this subject is not to make only an aesthetic choice, but rather a political or ethical one. It is to accept a fair amount of risk that our institutional peers will categorize and marginalize our total production under the rubric "shoah". Ultimately it exposes us to the powerful narrative and emotional forces emanating from this event, to walk through its ashes, take in the full force of its impact and survive to tell the tale. And at best, this is all we can hope to do. As Primo Levi wrote: "the absolute truth disappeared with the ashes in the crematoriums of the Third Reich." What remains are personal ways for each of us to live with it.