-
Target Practice
Exhibition
Target Practice
7 Jun 2019 – 11 Jun 2019
Event times
10am - 5pm daily
Cost of entry
Free entry
Address
- 5 Broad Street
- Margate
- CT9 1EW
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Train from London St Pancras International or Victoria
A conceptual exploration of the LGBTQ hidden history of homosexual men and the Holocaust. Using self-made props in my photography I explore identities that have been suppressed and marginalised.
About
In this photography exhibition piece 'Target Practice' I explore the hidden history of homosexual men in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. By drawing out extracts from the biography 'The Men With the Pink Triangle' by Heinz Heger, I create visual metaphors for the recounted memories of Josef Kohout, a twenty two year old concentration camp survivor.
The imagery mostly based on the form of the pink triangle is fractured and incomplete (the pink triangle was the symbol worn on a prisoner's uniform and used by the Nazi regime to indicate criminalised homosexual men); the fracturing alludes to the broken men and their lost lives - ignored and shamed by history. Each image has an accompanying extract from the biography that creates a resonance between the words and the image.
The partiality of memory and the impossibility of an artist to make work that could ever portray the reality of the Holocaust unless directly experienced was acknowledged when making the images; nevertheless, this Gay hidden history has long been ignored and deserves to be told and the work juxtaposes a collective social memory, that by its nature dominates and excludes, with the narrative of the 'other'.
