March 2015
In the series "Signs", Jegor Zaika photographs the locations of the former World War II extermination and concentration camps - as well as their surroundings. Modern pictures of peaceful life - fragments of a new infrastructure that has arisen on the spot of agonizing deaths of millions - these images depict a memory discording with a history of the place. What did prisoners see through the slats of the train cars that transported them to their death? Might the surroundings have seemed as banal to them as they do to visitors today? Zaika’s photos complicate the sense of past, present and future. Time can isolate us from the terror of these events. Yet “Signs” asks us to consider our knowledge of past in a more integral way: Just because we are in the present, does that mean we are “beyond?”