Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Memory’s Wound: On Art and Ethics

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is Creative Arts Initiative (CAI) Artist-in-Residence as the University at Buffalo. She an internationally renowned artist-painter, artist-theorist and psychoanalyst working between Paris and Tel Aviv. She is the author of The Matrixial Gaze and The Matrixial Borderspace on trauma, memory, feminine subjectivity, maternality, ethics and aesthetics. Her recent shows include: The Haunted House / The Human Condition. National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow and The 14th Istanbul Biennial. She is a Professor of Art and Psychoanalysis at The European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

In her talk, “Memory’s Wound: On Art and Ethics,” she will project examples of her artwork from the exhibition, BRACHA: Pietà—Eurydice—Medusa, May 6-July 29 at the UB Anderson Gallery, and discuss its rich layering of mythology and history. The iconography of the work stems from the history of her family during the Holocaust and more recently from the re-emergence of the artist’s experience of shellshock from years ago when she took the leading role in an operation to rescue the survivors of a shipwreck (“Medusa”). Often based on archival material, especially images of Jewish women and children being led to their deaths in Rovno, Ukraine which echoes the massacre at the Ponary forest during WWII (“Eurydice”), Bracha’s singular form of abstraction aims at a caring transformation her sources. With multiple layers of paint, color and line, she creates an ambiguous space that affords the viewer an intimacy with her subject matter and both obscures and recalls the pain it evokes (“Pieta”).