Opening April 11, Wako Works of Art is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Berlin-based photographer Yishay Garbasz. This will be Garbasz’s first solo exhibition in Japan, and will include the series “In My Mother’s Footsteps,” in which she revisited and photographed her mother’s memoirs of the Holocaust. Also on exhibit will be “In The Same House: Where a family lived for four or more generations,” a project developed in Taiwan, and “The Fence,” a series capturing the landscape along the Israeli-Palestinian border. The exhibition will be held in conjunction with Garbasz’s solo show at Tokyo Wonder Site, Shibuya.

Yishay Garbasz was born in Israel in 1970, and studied photography at Bard College, New York. Her work delves with social themes such as families and human rights. For “In My Mother’s Footsteps,” she traveled to Berlin, Holland, Poland and the Czech Republic to retrace her mother Salla’s paths as described in her memoirs of surviving the Holocaust. Salla was born in 1929 in Berlin, and the age of 4, moved to the Netherlands with her family to escape the spread of National Socialism, only to be sent to a concentration camp in 1942. At the urging of her husband, who had also survived the Nazi persecution but in Poland, Salla wrote about her days until her release. She completed the book in 1995. Although she was unable to read the book for some time, Yishay Garbasz eventually embarked on this project of both historical and personal significance, in her attempt to fully understand her mother’s history and her own. Using a heavy, large-format camera which requires one to focus on the subject with the utmost attention, Garbasz works with her mother’s memory in order “to go back to collect [parts of her mother’s soul]” that have been left behind; the images, displayed in this show with respective texts, observe into the past through scars that are still present today.

Garbasz’s work has been exhibited in the Norderlicht Fotofestival, Holland and has been the subject of a solo show at Chiang Mai Museum. Her book In My Mother’s Footsteps, published by Hatje Cantz, will become available at the time of the exhibition.

Also exhibiting at:
Tokyo Wonder Site, Shibuya
April 11 – May 16, 2009
Opening reception: Saturday, April 11, 7-9PM
http://www.tokyo-ws.org/english/access/access_shibuya.htm

This exhibition is sponsored in part by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Japan.

» Press Release(PDF)