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Ellen Rothenberg, “The Anne Frank Project”

Posted in Art, Installations, Uncategorized with tags , on June 30, 2008 by theobjectlesson

“American artist Ellen Rothenberg (born 1949) gave artistic expression to a longstanding preoccupation in the form of her Anne Frank Project, a tripartite installation consisting of A Partial Index (1991), A Probability Bordering on Certainty (1993) and The Conditions for Growth (1994). Her realization, after reading the critical and unexpurgated version of the diary, that earlier editions had eliminated nearly all references to the young girl’s burheoning sexuality and her troubled relationship with her mother, as well as to the family’s German origins and the fact that now, in Amsterdam, they were in hiding from the Germans, prompted Rothenberg to explore the ways in which Anne Frank has been mythologized, turned into a kind of Jewish saint stripped of both specificity and individual complexity.” (from: Absence/Presence. Critical Essays on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust, ed. Steve Feinstein)

 

Online at:

http://www.ellenrothenberg.com/index.html