Hand and Trapdoor

Natalia Romik’s first solo exhibition at Ben Hunter foregrounds her committed interest in investigating and preserving Jewish memory, in particular its material and architectural traces. The exhibition comprises two sculptures: Trapdoor (Zhovkva), an artistic tribute to survival architecture, a hiding place built and used by Jews during the Holocaust., and Jad, a nomadic sculpture created as a vehicle for urban protest.

About the exhibition

Trapdoor (Zhovkva), is an artistic tribute to survival architecture, a hiding place built and used by Jews during the Holocaust. It is a cast sculpture of the entry point to a hideout lifted from panels in a parquet floor in Zhovkva, present day Ukraine. The sculptural form is presented alongside results of extensive interdisciplinary research carried out by Romik alongside a team of anthropologists, historians, archaeologists and urban explorers with the aim to uncover, map and archive examples of Jewish survival architecture. The project pays tribute to the daily toil of those in hiding and those who provided hiding places, their creativity, solidarity, and will to live, often overlooked in the tradition of heroic commemorations. It reflects on fundamental problems of architecture and social coexistence, such as the relationship between form and function or the design and use of space.

The second monumental sculpture, Jad, is a nomadic machine clad in mirrors, shaped as a hand with a pointing finger. It is a tool for architectural protest and urban memory. The form of this sculpture is inspired by the Jewish liturgical instrument Yad, a hand-shaped pointer used to read Torah. In 2012, Romik transported the sculpture to places of architectural decay in Silesian Metropolis, condemning contemporary urban management which sees derelict and historically Jewish architecture destroyed or forgotten. Jad was deployed to call attention to erased architectural memory.

The exhibition foregrounds on the idea of visibility; Jad is clad in reflective material which aims to mirror and therefore magnify the urban erosion it is calling attention to, whilst also creating an illusion of disappearing. Trapdoor (Zhovkva) plays with visibility as an essential property of its architectural form; it must remain invisible to the unauthorised eye. Romik takes the tragic history of the Holocaust as a starting point for a universal reflection on methods of survival in situations of existential threat. Her sculptures elegantly open a dialogue about commemoration, memory, migration, loss and architectural creativity. They ruminate more broadly on the cognitive potential of architecture and art, reflecting upon the way in which community is established in situations of threat.