The Jewish/German Dialogue Project

          

 Individual  Works




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    Happy birthday, Karen

Prints
 About the Project 

  To explore together the "unspeakable" without being silent: this may be the best that descendants of both sides of genocidal violence can do. Together we are trying to re-travel a path of the Jewish-German encounter that was so severely ruptured by the Holocaust. Björn Krondorfer For a German Jew and a non-Jewish German today it may be unusual to think of the Shoah as a common ground. And yet, in 
our joint creative work we are able to find a shared place where 
we can explore and express productively our conflicts, ambivalences and discomforts. Karen Baldner

How do two Germans talk to each other in a post-Shoah world if 
they come  from a Jewish and a non-Jewish family background? 
We explore this question through a dialogue that moves not only 
through the verbal realm but more substantially through the language 
of the visual arts. We have created works of art that take on the medium of the visual book, a format rooted in the German and the Jewish traditions. Our book-objects are catalysts to our exchanges 
and witness the process of our intensely personal and artistic dialogue. The work we have created focuses on topics that have emerged from sharing our family histories and the experience of the 'here and now' against the backdrop of the Shoah.

Both of us have individually explored issues of the Holocaust through our respective work. Karen Baldner comes from a Jewish-German family persecuted during the Nazi era. She grew up in postwar Germany but today resides as a visual artist in the United States. 
She works in the media of Artist Books, addressing issues of victimization, empowerment and identity. She teaches Drawing 
and Bookarts at Herron School of Art & Design in Indianapolis, 
Indiana, USA. Björn Krondorfer comes from a non-Jewish German family, grew up in Germany, and is now Director of the Martin Springer Institute and Endowed Professor of Religious Studies at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, USA. As a scholar, his research and projects center on the legacy and the intergenerational transmission of the Holocaust. We met in 1992 at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Since then we have cultivated a friendship based on inspiration by each other's dedication to  the legacy of the Shoah as well as larger issues related to violence.

The choice of materials in our joint creative work is influenced by Karen's aesthetic sensibilities but ultimately rises  from the moment of our dialogue and from joint creative inventions which depart from Karen's visual work. The combination of format and material, such as text, printers 
ink, turnable pages and multiple layering stems from our joint interest in 
the book as a cultural tradition, a form of expression and a shared conceptual base.





INFORMATION 

Project Statement

Recent Exhibitions/Upcoming Events

Karen Baldner’s Website

Björn Krondorfer’s Website

Contact: kbaldner@ iupui.edu                bjorn.krondorfer@nau.edu


This project has been supported by grants from the Indiana Arts Commission and the Arts Council of Indianapolis
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