THE CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM PRESENTS
Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf
French Artist Linda Ellia Turns the Page on History by Inviting 600 People to Transform One of the Most Inflammatory Books of the 20th Century
February 11 – June 5, 2010
San Francisco, CA, January 21, 2010 -- In 2005, French painter and photographer Linda Ellia’s daughter showed her a book she had come across at the home of a family friend – a French translation of Hitler’s notorious memoir and manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle, in English). Ellia, who is Jewish, was stunned as she held the thick tome. It was as if she was holding Hitler in her hands, and the book’s weight was the heaviness of the Holocaust. She felt immediately compelled to respond. She awoke one night with an idea – what if she detached one of the pages to express her anger and resist the book’s horror? Grabbing a large red marker, she drew the head of a woman screaming on the loose page and named her Aile (the French word for ‘wing’).
“I felt such pleasure, that I continued on about 30 pages,” says Ellia. “I covered them with my words, with my drawings, with my paintings. I cut them up. It’s then that I thought about the others. Why not share the experience that I was in the process of living?”
Over the next three years, Ellia distributed the pages of Mein Kampf one by one to individuals from all walks of life – professional artists, youth and ordinary citizens each invited to paint, draw, sculpt, collage and blacken the page how they wished in response to the one they received. Six hundred pages came back to her and she gathered the results into a collective artwork and book titled Notre Combat (Our Struggle, in English) published in 2007 by Seuil Editions, a leading publisher of art books in France.
Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf, an exhibition on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco February 11 – June 15, 2010, is the first North American showing of the hundreds of pages returned to Ellia.
In addition to the work on view, the Museum will screen a documentary about Ellia and the project, provide a resource room about Mein Kampf developed in collaboration with the Holocaust Center of Northern California, and create opportunities for visitors to leave their own responses on a collective chalkboard ‘canvas.’
“This exhibition creates a unique opportunity for dialogue about tolerance in the modern world,” says Contemporary Jewish Museum Director, Connie Wolf. “Each of the 600 participants in Linda Ellia’s extraordinary project gives us a contemporary insight into issues of intolerance which are, unfortunately, still very alive today. The works show us the power of creative resistance, and we hope will inspire new ideas about making a difference. We are excited to see and learn from the contributions of our visitors in the interactive portion of the exhibition.”
Our Struggle
“The objective was to express on each page the emotion it evokes,” says Ellia. “Every page returned to me provoked a profound response. I felt together we could recreate the book and experience a new reading of the pages. It would become Our Struggle.”
Ellia launched her three-year effort in the streets right around her home in Paris. From the onset, she held firm to her conviction that people from all professions and social classes have something to express when faced with extreme injustice. “I stopped perfect strangers,” she says. “I would go into a café, and based solely on intuition, I would approach people that I thought could create an emotional, artistic page.”
She encountered many reactions – some were overcome with emotion; others wanted nothing to do with Mein Kampf; and some were outwardly racist and hostile.
But one particular reaction gave Ellia the will to continue her quest against all odds. That came from Simone Veil, a noted French lawyer and politician who became the first elected President of the European Parliament and who serves as the Honorary President of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah (Holocaust). Veil, a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, was profoundly moved by Ellia’s project and became its godmother.
In her forward to the book Notre Combat, Veil writes, “What should we do with such a book? Ban it? Some would still pass it around on the sly. Forget it? It would be an insult to the millions who died because of it. Burn it? It would be resorting to the methods used by the Nazis during the auto-de-fés of Kristallnacht. Linda Ellia’s luminous intuition was to turn this book into a memory vector. …This past is too burdensome to be silenced and whether we want it or not, the Holocaust is our common heritage and we must confront it. Linda Ellia’s work is an expression of this confrontation. It summons us to never forget what was.”
SIMONE VEIL (born 1927)
Survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau
16th President of the European Parliament
Former Minister of Health, France
Lifted by Veil’s support, Ellia doggedly pursued contributors and the project began to build – more and more people agreed to take a page home and work on it. Friends and family also helped to take pages to the far corners of the world. “A chain reaction was formed globally,” says Ellia. “And suddenly I had amazing messengers from all around the world helping me. The project became almost a performance – proof that it is possible to take up arms against trauma.” The pages began to steadily fill the mailbox.
Professional artists joined in the effort. Yugoslavian comic artist Enki Billal responded, “I don’t know how in 60 years no one has ever done this.” German painter, sculptor and performance artist Jonathan Messe took four pages and covered them front and back. Respected French painter Gérard Garouste wrote to Ellia, “I am frightened for you. I will support you and make something very personal.” Others who became involved include French fashion designer Christian Lacroix, Spanish painter Miquel Barcelo, French artist Philippe Cognee, French video artist Kiki Picasso and many others.
By 2007, Ellia had collected 600 pages from people living in as many as 17 countries from Cambodia to Algeria. The entire volume had been collectively transformed and was published under the title Notre Combat by Seuil Editions.
The Pages
The hundreds of pages in the exhibition, when viewed individually, offer a remarkable display of different artistic styles and present a multiplicity of voices and perspectives ranging from angry to mournful to hopeful.
Ellia’s only criterion for her diverse participants was that their piece not exceed the shape and size of the page so that it could be reconstituted into a book. The result is a collection of astounding variety. Erasing, wrapping, tearing, stitching, burning, drawing and pasting, the contributors rewrote Mein Kampf in 600 different ways.
A school classroom in Spain, working collaboratively, incorporated wire from an actual concentration camp into their work. A homeless café drifter in Ellia’s neighborhood sketched a scene of a Nazi officer and his family watching a ballet in a Paris theater. A woman merchant in Tel Aviv wrote out a prayer that is said during Passover at the Seder over the words printed on the page. One page entitled My Kampfetti is riddled with holes from a hole puncher and has a small plastic bag stapled to it with the punched out dots.
Several pages were created by California artists including 26-year-old San Francisco native, Robin Margerin. Now living in Paris, Margerin met Linda at the Beaux-Arts School and agreed to do a page. He decided to tar and feather it in a nod to the vigilante justice of the Old West and as “a metaphor for the humiliation we as a species, society or civilization carry for that most black mark on our recent history.”
Susan Thacker, a Jewish artist living in Carmel, CA, learned about the project through Ellia’s cousin and knew she had to participate. Thacker was attracted to the idea of artists and non-artists working collaboratively to remind people that they have the capacity to stop history from repeating itself. She chose to paint a praying minyan, the requisite 10 Orthodox Jewish men needed to say mourning prayers, as viewed from above. “Someone called it a gods-eye view,” she says. “The point is to view life from a different perspective.”
Ellia herself ultimately contributed 40 pages to the collective work including pages on which she affixed letters from people rejecting her invitation to participate and fervently criticizing her for the effort. The two stark final images in the exhibition are also Ellia’s. On one she placed a real gold tooth and on the other a lock of hair, objects often used to represent the magnitude of loss experience in the Holocaust.
Taken as a whole, the work functions as a new kind of memorial, one in which the participatory nature of its creation holds as much cathartic power as the finished product. The artist pages in Our Struggle don’t dwell on the original text, but instead diminish its power by turning it into the backdrop for profound acts of symbolic reclamation, a process Ellia feels is universally applicable.
“Today’s tyrants are not called Hitler and the victims are not inevitably Jews,” says Ellia. “Our Struggle is evidence of an emotion felt by artists, writers, poets, musicians, film makers, journalists, victims, Jews, Palestinians, Lebanese, Tibetans, Yemenites, students, the anonymous. It is a message of hope for all those dealing with racism, persecution and violence – that art conceived of as an inclusive act can be a powerful and emotional response to collective trauma.”
Also on View
Ellia’s concept for the public exhibition of the work is to create a dynamic place of memory, haven and testimony. To that end, Our Struggle features an opportunity for visitors to leave their own responses to the contents of the exhibition and the feelings the pages and book evokes. A large blackboard area invites visitors to draw or write, adding their voice to the hundreds.
A screening room provides visitors an opportunity to view a documentary (subtitled) about Ellia and the project entitled L’Art et la Maniere.
Also available is a resource room developed in partnership with the Holocaust Center of Northern California that provides visitors with more information about the publication history of Mein Kampf and the rise of Nazism in Germany.
This exhibition has been organized by the Contemporary Jewish Museum with the generous support of the Jewish Community Federation Holocaust Memorial Education Fund, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
About the Artist
Paris-based artist Linda Ellia has been painting for over fifteen years. She studied at the Beaux-Arts de Glaciere in Paris as well as the Ateliers d'Arts Decoratifs in Paris. She started her Notre Combat project in 2005, which culminated in 2007 with the publication of the book by the same name and a showing of the original pages at Theatre Forum Meyrin in Switzerland. In 2008, she created a sculpture for the Place St. Germain and participated in the Paris-wide Nuits Blanches events with a public artwork for the Paris Metro. Most recently, Ellia is working on a second book with Seuil Editions on her art entitled Hors Classe, forthcoming January 2010.
About the Contemporary Jewish Museum
With the opening of its new building on June 8, 2008, the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) ushered in a new chapter in its twenty-plus year history of engaging audiences and artists in exploring contemporary perspectives on Jewish culture, history, art, and ideas. The new facility, designed by internationally renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, is a lively center where people of all ages and backgrounds can gather to experience art, share diverse perspectives, and engage in hands-on activities. Inspired by the Hebrew phrase “L’Chaim” (To Life), the building is a physical embodiment of the CJM’s mission to bring together tradition and innovation in an exploration of the Jewish experience in the 21st century.
Major support for the Contemporary Jewish Museum comes from the Koret and Taube Foundations; Jim Joseph Foundation; The Wallace Foundation; Bernard Osher Jewish Philanthropies Fund; Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund; Institute of Museum and Library Services; Alexander M. and June L. Maisin Foundation; Terra Foundation for American Art; Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund; Bank of America; Pacific Gas and Electric Company; The Skirball Foundation; Target; and Wells Fargo Foundation. The Museum is supported by the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.
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General Information
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