The museum is dedicated to preserving the stories of Polish citizens forcibly deported to Siberia and other remote regions during the Soviet and Nazi occupations.
Juhana Moisander from Finland, Gail Ritchie from Northern Ireland, Rebekka Bauer from Germany and Raphaël Dallaporta from France spent several weeks at World War II memorial sites across Europe to create site-specific works inspired by the local history, memory culture, and community, developing personal interpretations of history.
During his stay at The Sybir Memorial Museum, Moisander created a moving audiovisual installation titled “Mother.”
According to the museum website: “While listening to the memories of Sybiraks, he encountered a striking linguistic coincidence: one deportee described the rhythm of a departing train as a repeating sound — “mat-ka, mat-ka, mat-ka.” In Finnish, the word “matka” means “journey.”
This dual meaning became a key concept for the Finnish artist, linking the idea of the mother with the experience of a forced journey and separation.
The website adds: “Drawing on personal family history and a shared wartime experience between Finland and Poland, his project for the Sybir Museum builds a compelling bridge between past trauma and present-day concerns, particularly the rising polarization within society.”
German artist Rebekka Bauer’s installation consisting of drawings, photographs, and the diary of a woman involved in the anti-fascist resistance movement, is the fruit of her residence in Paraloup, Italy, a former partisan stronghold in the Alpine region of Piedmont which is dedicated to the memory of the Italian resistance.
Raphaël Dallaporta’s residency at the Bastogne War Museum in the Belgian Ardennes resulted in a series is trees growing on former battlefields that serves as a silent witness to history. The artist’s photographs and sculptures treat the Ardennes landscape as an archive of war.
During her residency at La Coupole in northern France, a former underground bunker built by the Germans between 1943 and 1944, Gail Ritchie created a series of works exploring themes of time, transformation, and the fragility of existence.
The director of The Sybir Memorial Museum, Professor Wojciech Śleszyński, told the media that it is not for the first time that it hosts a modern art exhibition. “The museum has to adapt its means of communication to the perception of successive generations of visitors”, he said.
The exhibition runs at The Sybir Memorial Museum in Białystok until the end of June. It is scheduled to move later to Bastogne in Belgium and La Coupole in France.
The Art of Remembrance project is co-funded by Creative Europe, a funding programme of the European Commission.
(mk)