Skip to main navigationSkip to main content
The University of Southampton
The Parkes Institute

'Visualisation, Memory and The Archive' Seminar

Time:
18:00
Date:
6 October 2015
Venue:
Lecture Theatre C Avenue Campus University of Southampton SO17 1BF

For more information regarding this seminar, please email Parkes Institute at parkes@southampton.ac.uk .

Event details

By means of her artworks the English painter Barbara Loftus materializes the evidence she has exhumed in the German State Archives to reconstruct the lost Berlin world of her German-Jewish mother, Hildegard, and the fate of her family. The artist will discuss the background to her work and present the 30minute film ‘Lieder ohne Worte’ which accompanied her Berlin exhibition at The Ephraim Palais in 2013.

Part of the Parkes Research Seminar Series 2015/16

Speaker information

Barbara Loftus, Artist. Barbara Loftus is a figurative painter who also makes artist's bookworks. She combines a traditional studio practice with performed re-enactment, historical research and digital media to feed into her image making process. The theme of her current work is the convergence of personal memory and major historical events. Her mother Hildegard's long-held silence, only broken in 1995, unlocked a door into the spirit of a ruined Europe, recounting personal experiences of growing up as a Jew in Germany during the inter-war period. Through a series of visual narratives which take the form of paintings, films, and bookworks, she constructs a visual interpretation of trans-generational memory, mining the experience and perceptions from two generations divided in time by the second world war - her mother's and her own. Her focus on specific details of everyday life frames significant memory images that have the capacity to act as historical ciphers of human experience.

Privacy Settings