Documentation of the provoking two year exhibition YOUR COLORING BOOK – a wandering installation, exhibited in Israel, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany.
The exhibition questions how you can show a different reality by distorting an imago so that it reveals only partial truth. The format is a child’s coloring-book with drawings based on images from Nazi Germany and the 2nd World War. It turned out to be a coloring-book not everyone would like to color…
The documentary focuses on and compares the reactions of visitors to the exhibit in each of the four countries where the exhibition was held. Amongst others exhibited in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and The Israel Museum in Jerusalem
Herman Pfutze, Kunst Forum, Germay
‘Every person is partly to blame for his life, and in that sense, by being alive, for what happens to him… coloring pictures can make all this clear.’
Emanuel Zissman MK, Israeli Government
‘There is a danger… we must minimise the reaction of every visitor.’
Tom Segev, Historian
‘This is not a work of art, it is really a very political statement.’
Patia Dagan, playwright and Holocaust survivor
‘I am afraid that it’s about life.’
Batsheva Tsur, The Jerusalem Post, 22 January 1997
‘The Israel Museum opened a controversial exhibit of coloring books devoted to the Holocaust, despite requests from angry Holocaust survivors that they not go on public display. … Lemberg, director of Amcha, an organisation that provides emotional support for survivors , said that the book was shown to a group at Amcha. There was horror and shock. This was twofold – firstly, the apparently innocent pictures, and secondly that it received legitimisation from the Israel Museum… The feeling is that a national institution is giving legitimacy to the travesty of the Holocaust.’ …
Helen Motro, Jerusalem Post, 26 January 1997
…” Katsir’s provocative exhibit frames the Holocaust in the format of a children’s coloring book. … The exhibit has evoked sharp criticism from Holocaust survivors. … They won’t color in Katsir’s pictures. Nobody expects them to. The exhibit exists for all the others, Jewish or not, to whom the Holocaust is becoming a remote historical icon, divorced from emotional content. Thus the argument that an exhibit may be “shocking” or “upsetting” to survivors is a ludicrous s justification for stifling it.” …