For three years now, the Jewish-Russian artist Olga Stozhar has been working on a large-scale project dealing with a subjective commemoration and artistic "bringing to life" of the victims of Nazism. The project is titled: "they are looking at us". For this purpose, Olga Stozhar uses photographs of victims who died in the concentration camps or during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. She obtains these photographs from archives and available documentary material. In a highly intense drawing process, she uses the images as a model to bring the facial features of the victims into a different life on sheets of A3 paper through an unceasing sequence of black, blue or red lines.
The artist's electrifying, dynamic line is essential in creating this sense of life, whereby her approach diverges from a conventional analytic drawing process. Her line much rather serves, like a pendulum with a momentum-generating weight, to trace an extremely complex path across the entire field of the drawing surface through expansive movements, which always leads her to the edge of the plane and then back, resulting in various dense areas that form over the course of the work.
Stozhar employs a fine, circling line. This line always remains extant as a line. Even in the most intensively dense areas and erratically jagged forms, it is the individual line that delineates its way to an unpredictable destination. Applied to the paper with varying pressure, it nevertheless always remains the same thin line. She never uses multiplied or mechanical lines in the shape of hatching. Her line displays densities, entanglements, a dense proximity with itself, but also isolation in the emptiness of the space. Its path over the paper is characterised by a dynamic progression and expansiveness as well as countless about turns. The space of the paper is explored differently in each drawing. Some of the linear areas become so dense that the white of the paper disappears, while elsewhere, there are open areas in which the paper appears as a bright white surface. However, the white and the black have nothing to do with light and shade. Remark-ably, there is no light and no shade in the world of Olga Stozhar's drawings. It would therefore be possible to speak of a world beyond our natural world, a world of speaking ghosts or one of souls. There is no narrative in her drawing world, everything is much rather concentrated on elementary human expression.
The scale of the faces is much larger than that of a human face. Nonetheless, they do not appear monumental. The focus on the harmony of the lines brings to appearance a purely human expression rather than the individual features of the face. This concentration on expression keeps us at bay so that we experience the faces as coequal and not as enlarged. The clearly visible material physicality and energy of the line and the fragile softness and thinness of the paper renders the human vulnerability and affectedness all the more evident.
Each face is framed differently within the pictorial format, whereby Stozhar resists gravity and disregards the vertical and horizontal. At times, the faces appear so tilted in the picture that parts of them are cropped off. By this means, however, she reinforces the immediacy and directness of the assertion because the face seems to emerge from a living moment.
The dialogue between the passages of dense drawing and the blank areas of the white paper cause a constant tipping of our perception as beholders. We are unable to decide whether the actual weight of meaning lies in the fullness or in the emptiness. This vacillation in particular lends Stozhar's access to the murdered victims an appropriateness in the open apportionment of significances because we as survivors need to re-establish our access differently to each individual drawing.
Viewing the drawings consecutively as in a book, the richness and diversity of the human face with the life inscribed in it is revealed. Then, viewing the faces as they have been carefully combined into individual blocks in the exhibition, a different, paradoxical experience ensues. In the fullness of their consonance, the loss inflicted on humanity through these murders is manifested. Simultaneously, however, and this is an astonishing experience, a relationship develops between these people, they speak to one another.
Because this dialogue plays such a crucial role within the individual presentation blocks, Olga Stozhar worked on the installation for a long time. Her concern is to show warmth and love, in other words, the opposite of violence and death, cruelty and injustice.
As a dialogical linking structure, Olga Stozhar has chosen a three-part rhythm which utomatically creates a tension between centralisation and decentralisation, central axis and peripheral axis. At the same time, through the uniform spacing of the drawings, a vertical and horizontal link is established between the faces. A complex field of possibilities arises from this arrangement because formal properties within the individual drawings are able to pass over from one drawing to another.
Each face is shaped by the construction of the mouth, nose, eyes and ears, as well as the accompanying hair. The position of eyes with respect to one another, the manner in which a nose sets itself between them and reaches towards a mouth, the way in which the mouth, through the curve of the lips, lends the nasal cavities a closed or open form, differs in each specific case. Because, however, Olga Stozhar's line never describes the individual sense organs, but integrates them in a web of connecting lines from which they emerge, the connecting lines also enter into a conversation with the neighbouring faces. Material traits, such as the hair and the individual shapes are not imitated, everything is geared towards connection, even where the connecting paths themselves have extremely different formal properties. Despite all the restlessness of the line, however, one organ pushes itself to the fore, creating a locus of stillness within the dynamic accents on the surface: the eyes. They act as a fixation point and glue themselves to us, the viewers, in the expectancy of an answer to the open questions of humanity.
Can art deal with this human catastrophe? Adorno's dictum that to write poetry after the atrocities of Auschwitz is barbaric comes to mind. This dictum cannot, in any event, be answered with artistic realism of any kind: the murdered victims cannot be brought back to life by this means. Olga Stozhar's responseto this challenge is twofold: In place of realism, she employs a drawing process that is not oriented towards the external world and she puts the horror aside. Instead, she focuses on the human core, the individual expression. Her "bringing into life" of the victims remains tied exclusively to the artistic process.
Stozhar invents a free line for herself, which seems to stream out of her and culminates in an empathic immersion in the Other. The line engages in an open process that has to be different for each individual person. Rather than devising a specific strategy, Stozhar attempts to set out anew each time on an openended search for the Other. In a seemingly erratic process, she gives her line free rein. At times, she blackens the white space of the drawing to such an extent that she drives the paper to the very depths of its fibres. The Other must be created in a single drawing session. No details are chiselled out, everything is directed towards the elaboration of the multidimensionality of the person, which emerges in the combinations, the interplay of density and emptiness, and expresses itself in their respective sense of aliveness.
Olga Stozhar's approach avoids any overall representation of the victimhood of the murdered individuals. Instead, she establishes a new rapport between them. Her thin, lively pen line allows the faces to speak in such distinctive ways that a human bond arises between them which was absent in every respect among the perpetrators. Stozhar's formal means, the unbridled drawing pen, sets a dialectic in motion that reveals the victims in their individuality and consolidates this individuality into a polyphonic choir of highly independent voices, thereby creating a communality that paradoxically eulogises human diversity in the face of its ruin and poses us, the succeeding generations, the question of humanity.
ROLF HENGESBACH
