Materia reprezentacji. Fakturalna lektura prac wojennych Henryka Strenga / Marka Włodarskiego
The Fabric of Representation. Textural Reading of Wartime Works by Henryk Streng / Marek Włodarski

Summary/Abstract: The article is an analysis of three works from the WWII times by Henryk Streng / Marek Włodarski, coming from the collections of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Starting with an inspection of drawings from the Lvov ghetto and the Stutthof camp with the eyes of an art conservation expert, the author looks at the problem of deformation of the modernist tradition in these artefacts and muses at the way the wartime biographic trajectories contribute to the post-war art field. First of all, however, the pondering of Streng’s drawings leads the author to the key question about the distinctness of the visual testimony compared to discursive testimony. He tries to tackle the problem by referring to the ideas of vestigium (an impression, a trace) and texturization of the past (Ewa Domańska), i.e., the sensitivity to the sense-generating dimension of the material nature of a historic source. Consequently, Streng’s works are viewed in a dual manner: using the adopted optics they are performances referring to historic events and at the same time objects with a rich texture, which in their ontological stratum – as tangible objects, artefacts, things – introduce an alternative non-discursive model of testimony of the past.

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