Remembering our father’s words
2018
USC Shoah Foundation, Leavey Library, Los Angeles, USA
Remembering our Father's words, 2018. Stainless steel
A text sculpture featuring the testimony of jona goldrich, a holocaust survivor
Stainless steel, 200 x 200 x 270cm, 2018
A permanent sculpture on public view at USC Shoah Foundation.
The artwork features the life story of Jona Goldrich, a holocaust survivor who escaped from Poland during WW2. Jona’s testimony has been sculpted into an artwork.
Sculpturally, the autobiographical account takes on a form similar to that of a memory - we can delve in at any point, and sometimes one part of the story might obscure another. Reading an account as a physical form is akin to getting to know a person and their history: It takes time to really understand and unravel the complexities, you have to absorb it, gaze at it, and look from different angles.
Nicola Anthony’s artworks explore the human condition and the threads of commonalities that lie at the heart of human life, featuring people who have lived through different times and challenges.
The steel sculpture has been carved using lasers, and shaped by heat and hand into a single strand of words which has been twisted and woven into the form you see here.. The looping path of this line represents the Jona’s life journey during his time escaping from Poland and finally arriving in Palestine. The complexity of the twists and turns also represent the complexity of human life, the multilayered form of the past that lives inside us.
Remembering our father’s words was commissioned by Melinda Goldrich and gifted to USC Shoah Foundation, which was founded in 1994 by Steven Spielberg. The sculpture unveiling coincides with the dedication ceremony for the USC Shoah Foundation’s new home at Leavey Library at University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
About the Foundation:
The USC Shoah Foundation’s Institute for Visual History and Education is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. It was established by Steven Spielberg in 1994, one year after completing his Academy Award-winning film Schindler's List. A compelling voice for education and action, the original aim of the Institute was to record testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust (which in Hebrew is called the Shoah) as a collection of videotaped interviews.
Visit this artwork:
The USC Shoah Foundation is located in the Leavey Library at University of Southern California. The state-of-the-art interactive archive is open to the public Monday through Friday from 10:00 am — 3:00 pm.
Take the elevator to floor 4 and please bring a form of identification to gain entry to the building. To book a free short tour of the testimonies, the interactive virtual reality experience and to have a conversation with the life-sized interactive digital biography of Pinchas Gutter, a Polish Holocaust survivor, please call and schedule an appointment on 213-740-6001.
More info about the USC Shoah Foundation here [https://sfi.usc.edu/}
In partnership with:
Leavey Library, USC Campus