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Three trapezoidal black-glass sculptures

Gallery of the Missing

An Installation by Via Lewandowsky in the Eric F. Ross Gallery

For the Gallery of the Missing, the artist Via Lewandowsky developed three opaque showcases titled Order of Disappearance. As visitors draw near to these trapezoidal sculptures, they hear audio recordings on special headphones that describe obliterated objects in German and English.

The sound pieces are about objects that serve as examples of the larger destruction of Jewish cultural property. According to the artist, they are meant to remind visitors of the existence and nature of “what no longer exists.”

Map with all buildings that belong to the Jewish Museum Berlin. The Libeskind building is marked in green

Where

Libeskind Building, ground level, Eric F. Ross Gallery
Lindenstraße 9–14, 10969 Berlin

The sound pieces each contain an auditory description of a missing artifact from the arts, academia, or society:

  • Otto Freundlich’s sculpture Large Head ("The New Man"), presumed to have been destroyed
  • The Encyclopedia Judaica, which was never finished beyond the letter K
  • The head of the goddess Hygieia as the final relic of the Jewish Community Hospital of Frankfurt

The project channels Daniel Libeskind’s architecture. The Voids Libeskind inscribed into the building embody the unspeakable loss that Berlin and Germany sustained with the murder of Jews.

Who is Via Lewandowsky?

Via Lewandowsky, *1963 in Dresden, artist, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden; his installation Gallery of the Missing has been on display at the JMB since 2001

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Who is Daniel Libeskind?

Daniel Libeskind, *1946 in Łódź, emigrated to Israel in 1957, moved to the USA in 1960, architect of the Jewish Museum Berlin

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