Patricia Shira Mano Tolentino - Niñez Rubata

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The vice-president of the RO.SA.M. Cultural Association Iris Peynado presents:

EXHIBITION PROJECT: NIñEZ RUBATA

by Patricia Shira Mano Tolentino in collaboration with Rosalia Ramirez

curated by Roberta Semeraro

Magazzino Gallery

Holocaust Memorial Day 2020

PRESS RELEASE

The Exhibition “Niñez rubata” of Israeli artist Patricia Shira Mano Tolentino gets its inspiration from the children’s portraits displayed at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Centre and will be staged within the Magazzino Gallery premises on the ground floor of Palazzo Contarini Polignac, very close to the Academia Bridge, whose spaces are kindly being made available by the owners.

It is an official event promoted by the Coordination of Remembrance Day (of which RO.SA.M is partner). The Opening Day is foreseen for Tuesday 21st January at 5:30pm; the exhibition will run until 4th February 2020.

“The idea of the Ninez Rubata project was born about a year ago while I was watching pictures of the Holocaust/Shoah victims, in particular from the Warsaw Ghetto. – says Patricia Tolentino - I was struck by a photograph picturing a child, titled “A child dressed in rags sitting in a Ghetto street” and I decided to paint a small portrait of his face, of his frightened expression. After that, I looked for other children to portray and I have come up with the idea of creating a wall composed of the Warsaw Ghetto oil paintings and inspired by the French artist Christian Boltansky’s work. This project is about memory ad aims at fighting the fall into oblivion, anti-Semitism and Shoah denial”.

On, 22nd January at 5.30 p.m. a meeting is scheduled at the Venice Jewish Museum (Campo di Ghetto Nuovo) during which the catalogue of the Niñez Rubata exhibition will be presented. Among the speakers, Michela Zanon, the Jewish Museum co-director, Roberta Semeraro, the exhibition curator, Iris Peynado project organizer. Patricia Shira Mano Tolentino will be engaging in a dialogue with the poems by Rosalia Ramirez, telling her experience/acquired awareness and the necessity to express herself on the Shoah theme.

A special contribution to the event will be the presence of Lia Finzi Federici author of the book “Dal buio alla luce” (From Darkness to Light): as a Jew, she was persecuted by the Nazi-fascist regime since the enactment of the 1938 racial laws. She is one of the most prominent testimonial figures in the city of Venice, appreciated for her tireless engagement with the young generations. 

NIÑEZ RUBATA, curated by the art critic Roberta Semeraro, is presented and supported by Iris Peynado, Vice-President of Ro.Sa.M. Cultural Association which, in recent years, has dedicated its work to sustainability projects.

Stealing is in itself a crime, and this is even more serious when the body of crime is the most precious gift each one of us possesses: life. Stealing innocent children’s lives is, however, beyond any imaginable crime and can be considered true human madness.

Some of these faces are completely disfigured by the suffering, so much that they have lost their freshness. Others are veiled with sadness. The poems follow the course of this chorus of characters, becoming more acute in some verses and melancholic in others. The Painter Tolentino on the one hand and the Poetess Ramirez on the other (the two authors live in two different parts of the world, the former in Israel and the latter in the Dominican Republic), in dialogue with each other, seem to respond to a rhythm of memory. Their voices echo on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and they evoke memory.

The courage to remember, and re-live the Holocaust, reinvigorates the strength needed to call for understanding, responsibility, sensitivity and wisdom in the world so that childhood will never again be stolen from any child.

For its deeply moral contents, the installation is hosted by Bikem de Montebello in the Magazzino Gallery of Palazzo Contarini Polignac exhibition space as part of a series of shows and events dedicated to world religions, Bikem claims:

“some artists create for no other reason than their art. Consciously or not, they are inspired by something greater than themselves and their art: the spiritual foundation of life, the great justification for the world’s essence. They all have in common the search of their art’s sources, their life vision and their way to represent it. This series of exhibitions aims to show these thoughts that mix issues of spirituality and art”.

During the exhibition time, some meetings will be organized with classes of the Venetian Schools dedicated to the theme of the memory of the Shoha and archival materials from the World Center for the Memory of the Shoah Yad Vashem in Jerusalem will be shown to the public. A catalog / book dedicated to NIÑEZ RUBATA edition by Marianne Tolentino will be published.

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