Yishai Jusidman, Auschwitz (2011), Photo courtesy of the artist.

Yishai Jusidman: Prussian Blue

August 27 – December 15, 2024

Opening Reception, Thursday, September 5 
The William Benton Museum of Art: 5–7pm
Contemporary Art Galleries: 6–8pm

“How can we ask ethical questions through aesthetic problems?” writes Georges Didi-Huberman. In the face of the “genocidal dehumanization” that was the Holocaust, how might images act, not as an absolute truth (an impossibility), but as an “opening of knowledge through the mediation of a moment of seeing”?  Prussian Blue presents Mexican artist Yishai Jusidman’s compelling meditation on these queries. Through the medium of painting, Jusidman explores the extent to which visual imagery can effectively convey the horror of the Holocaust. Can painting be made adequate to its representational aims? Can it address the tensions arising between what is present and what remains absent, between what is visible and what haunts us just beyond the visible? How might the inevitable inadequacy of the image be productively embedded in the representation itself?

Prussian blue, a pigment chemically related to the Zyklon-B gas used by the Nazis, is the very substance that closes the paintings’ representational gap, while emphasizing as well the safety of art spectatorship. Thus, the aesthetic dilemma becomes an ethical one. Prussian Blue plunges us deep into the heart of this predicament. Offering no panacea, the artist’s depictions of the now empty architectures and landscapes of the concentration, work and extermination camps denies us any position of comfort or moral certainty, any consoling illusion that we have somehow moved beyond such barbarism.

Guest curated by Jose Falconi, Assistant Professor of Art History & Human Rights, and Robin Greeley, Professor of Art History, the exhibition is displayed across three venues—UConn’s William Benton Museum of Art, Contemporary Art Galleries, and Dodd Center for Human Rights.  It is co-sponsored by the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program of Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs, the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, and UConn Global Affairs.  Prussian Blue inaugurates the “Nuremberg-ICTY Archives Initiative,” which invites artists to create contemporary responses to these important archives at UConn.