iJoods Museum (Jewish Museum, Jewish Cultural Quarter)Amsterdam Centrum
Diana Blok in the Art Gallery
This exhibition has ended.
Photographer Diana Blok's project "Time Tells" traces her father's hidden Jewish past, from escaping the Holocaust to Buenos Aires, in photos, texts and film.
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The one colour photograph here was printed as a negative by accident. Blok zoomed in on the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and in the reversed print the paper wishes in the cracks look like jewellery and the stones look liquid. For her, it stands for the pain she felt there.
Her father worked for the Turkish ambassador in The Hague, who took him to Buenos Aires before the war. His parents and brother were murdered in Auschwitz. He hid being Jewish from his wife and four daughters, and Blok found out by chance in 2009. You walk into three strands of what she made from it: black-and-white still lifes of the clothes her mother, once a Buenos Aires couturier, sewed for herself and her girls; that colour print; and a documentary in which Blok meets the ambassador's family in Istanbul.
It's a small selection from one project in the Art Gallery, not a retrospective. Entry is in the €20 museum ticket, free with a Museumkaart. Closes 18 October.
Look for
Wailing Wall I (2012)
Look for the enlarged colour detail of the Wall, accidentally printed in negative, so the folded wish notes read as jewellery and the stone seems to flow.
Her mother's clothes
Black-and-white still lifes of garments Blok's mother designed, sewed and embroidered for herself and her four daughters, photographed after the wall-to-wall wardrobe she left in 2005.
The Istanbul documentary
Blok sits down with the family of the Turkish ambassador who took her father to Buenos Aires and so kept him out of the Holocaust.
Good for
- An Hour Or Less
- Locals Who've Seen It All
Skip if
You want a full Blok retrospective: this is a small selection from one project.
Also at Joods Museum (Jewish Museum, Jewish Cultural Quarter)
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Image credits
8
- Joods Museum (Jewish Museum, Jewish Cultural Quarter)S Sepp / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- The Land of Chocolate Sprinkles. Building a new world togetherCourtesy of H'ART Museum
- Chez Matisse - Masterpieces from Centre PompidouCourtesy of H'ART Museum
- The Poor Man's Rembrandt ProjectCourtesy of Rembrandt House Museum
- H'ART MuseumFentener van Vlissingen, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Rembrandt House Museum14:43, 17 October 2006 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Amsterdam MuseumJvhertum, Public domain
- Museum Willet-HolthuysenJane023 / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain