Art review: Silent Village at DOX

The engaging and thought-provoking exhibition "The Silent Village" at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art reflects on the liquidation of Lidice as its 70th anniversary approaches. "The Silent Village" is a touring exhibition project initiated by the Ffotogallery in Wales and curated by Russell Roberts of the University of Wales, Newport. It first went on display in 2010 in the Welsh town of Penarth and then showed in Mostyn before traveling to Prague.

Roberts contacted a number of artists and asked them to produce new works to bring a contemporary perspective to the atrocities of Lidice. The starting point for this reflection was Humphrey Jennings' 1943 film The Silent Village, which re-imagines the repression and terror that was happening in Nazi-occupied Europe as taking place in the Welsh mining village of Cwmgiedd.

Roberts selected projects by Welsh artist Peter Finnemore and New York-based Italian artist Paolo Ventura, who each contributed a series of black-and-white photographs, and also a short story by Welsh writer Rachel Trezise.

As history tells us, Hitler gave the order to wipe Lidice off the map and leave no traces that it had ever existed in retribution for the May 27, 1942, assassination of acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich - ostensibly because residents of Lidice were suspected of harboring and aiding members of the resistance. The Nazis executed all the males over 16 and sent the women and children to extermination camps. A handful of children were placed with German families for "Aryanization." Only 17 children returned after the war.

Instead of erasing Lidice from human memory, this atrocious act caused the name of the village to be seared into the consciousness of the world, with some towns even changing their names to Lidice. Lidice holds a powerful place in collective memory to this day.

Filmed very soon after the Lidice massacre, under the auspices of the UK Information Ministry, Jennings' film depicts increasing pressures and repressions and ultimately the final blow by occupying forces, with the amateur cast being drawn from among the real inhabitants of the Welsh village. Jennings' film, like much propaganda, also serves as an illustration of how governments instill fear in their populations while purporting to be working to combat terror.

Contemporary art works by Finnemore, Ventura and Trezise are installed between the bookends of Jennings' 1943 film on the lower level of DOX's tower galleries and Jan Kaplan's newly commissioned film installation 10:35 on the upper level of the tower.

The exhibition 10:35, separate but closely linked to "The Silent Village," takes its title from the time that the assassination of Heydrich took place. Kaplan's film installation, spread across three large screens, repeats the decisive moments in a continual loop. The footage for 10:35 was taken from the longer 1992 film SS-3: The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, which plays in its entirety in the same room. In SS-3, Jan and Krystyna Kaplan aimed to recreate the events surrounding the assassination with a close fidelity to historical fact.

All else presented in connection with "The Silent Village" is inspired by factual events but ventures freely into imaginative or poetic territory. Finnemore's installation "Everyday" consists of a series of black-and-white prints of ordinary things captured in the icy stillness of deserted spaces. The 1940s atmosphere he evokes is occasionally pulled forward into more recent times, such a with a stack of video cassettes (including one of Jennings' film) beneath an old record player or with a modern stamp from the post-1993 independent Czech Republic on old postcards of Lidice and Berlin.

Ventura is showing a series based on old photographs of Nazi officers and other archival pictures with their surfaces expressively stained and scratched, the officers' faces mask-like, children's faces obliterated. The flaws are used in a more metaphorical way than merely to imitate the marks of time. Also in this exhibition room, headphones are provided to listen to a recording of Trezise's short story A Child Named Lidice, centering on a girl from Lidice who was adopted by a German family.

While perhaps capturing something of the period atmosphere, the black-and-white photographs by these two contemporary artists, using as a point of departure a film made seven decades ago, lack the immediacy of both Kaplan's film (as a document of history) and of Jennings' film (as a historical document of Welsh village life in the 1940s). Situated between turbulent fact and fiction, they succeed in conveying a sense of emptiness and annihilation, of capturing memory frozen in time.

Film remains at the heart of this exhibition project and acts as much more than just a catalyst for creating new contemporary visual art. Kaplan's film installation provides good closure to the exhibition, with its cinematic distillation and looping repetition of a fateful few minutes in time that have reverberated in collective memory and imagination for many decades and still resonate strongly today.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com