Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign

by Moriya Vanderhoef

This week’s event was the keynote to the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference. The speakers Stih & Schnock, a team of artists and historians based in Berlin, spoke on a theme which runs  through their work, “Memory, Art and Social Sculpture.”

The journey they took us on was visually interesting, thought-provoking, and heart-wrenching. Their major projects center on the treatment of Jewish people when the Nazis were in power and memorializing those lost during that horrific time in Germany’s history.

The memorial artwork they began with originally struck me as cold and flippant; it consisted of signs with brightly colored, simplistic pictures on one side and Nazi laws pretaining to the Jewish population on the other.  After much thought on their project, however, I’ve come to feel quite differently; I now feel that the signs signify the slow change through law in the treatment of a whole group of people and that they are deeply important to have in a public space.  Perhaps, through constant reminder, an atrocity such as the Holocaust will never happen again.

Many of Stih and Schnock’s works have this same, slow, sinking effect.

For more thought-provoking speakers and lectures, please see the Center’s Calendar of Events.