Elżbieta Janicka: The Odd Place

Elżbieta Janicka’s The Odd Place is an exceptional exhibition: minimalist, austere and ascetic in form. It comprises only six black-and-white, large-format photographs of the air in… or perhaps above? Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Kulmhof am Ner, Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, together with the looped sound of thirteen recordings made at these sites. Yet, as Rafał Jakubowicz observes in his moving text on the exhibition, it is “So little and so much. The dominant sensation is silence. The silence of the white, large-format photographs and the silence recorded in spaces of death”. Within this silence arises a torrent of questions about memory, the past, the causes of the destruction of European Jewish civilisation, our response to the Holocaust, identity, and the ambiguity of products that are innocent by design and in common use.