ABSTRACT
This project moves from explorations of space, through photography, to literature haunted by genocide. Ranbir Kaleka’s Consider (2007), a riveting installation piece commissioned by the Spertus Museum in Chicago as a Holocaust memorial, captures beautifully the landscape of Holocaust postmemory that this book sets out to describe. Through a layer of glass and across a long courtyard one watches a video screened behind a still painting of a girl in plaits; behind her still image fi lms of her daily life in India focalized around doing her hair are broadcast. While daily life seemingly gaily proceeds, voices from different nations read out testimonies. It is surprising, dissonant, and utterly engrossing to fi nd an Indian family and the landscape that surrounds them overlaid with this soundtrack of memories from Holocaust survivors. The fi lm unnerves. Hair as its central metaphor becomes at once the quotidian practice of combing and arranging hair that many young girls perform and the industrial and disgusting use of hair during the Nazi genocide. While the argument of the fi lm remains indeterminate-is Kaleka suggesting that trauma underlies all daily life?—the questions it raises resonate powerfully for the artist forcefully brings out the synergies of international responses to this European genocide.
