Performative Holocaust Commemoration in the 21st Century

Diana I. Popescu is Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Her research sits at the intersection of Holocaust studies, art history and museum studies. She has written on audience reception, and the ethics and aesthetics of Holocaust memory and representation in museums and in the visual arts. Tanja Schult is Associate Professor of Art History at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research has focused on the commemoration of the Holocaust and other painful pasts in a variety of media.

Introduction: Performative Holocaust commemoration in the 21st century

Diana I. Popescu and Tanja Schult

1. The Holocaust is present: reenacting the Holocaust, then and now

Rachel E. Perry

2. ‘Doing’ memory: performativity and cultural memory in Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Alter Bahnhof Video Walk

Laura M.F. Bertens

3. Archaeological fever: situating participatory art in the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto

Maria Magdalena Dembek

4. Reading the traces: embodied engagement with the past at three former Nazi concentration camps

Kerry Whigham

5. Remembrance in the Living Room [Zikaron b’Salon]: grassroots gatherings as new forms of Holocaust commemoration in Israel

Liat Steir-Livny

6. Pedagogy, performativity and ‘never again’: staging plays from the Terezín Ghetto

Lisa Peschel and Alan Sikes