New Essay in Guernica!
I love Guernica‘s “Cutting Room,” which features pieces–poems, essays–that didn’t make it into writer’s books. So, I’m really happy to be part of the latest issue with a contribution of my own, an essay about the famous logo of Solidarność. This essay didn’t make it into Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity, and I’m thrilled that it gets a second life now. The Solidarność logo was the first piece of graphic design that ever haunted me; it was there throughout my childhood in Poland and shaped my understand of what design could do, how it could influence people, what it could say.
Also, I’m so thankful for what Jina Moore Ngarambe writes about Exhibitions, as a way of introducing the essay: “A child of diplomats, she was the only Jewish student in her Polish secondary school; her mother interviewed refugees from the Bosnian genocide. How people narrate atrocity — in linear stories, in visual arts, in embodied memory — was no abstraction for Dubrow, and she is, thankfully, unshy about merging her interpretations of personal and collective memory, revealing the many ways in which one necessitates the other. Such an expression is a subtle but powerful political act in a culture committed to recognizing collective suffering only if it makes no demands on the individual.”