When Your Grandparents Were Little: Vivienne Koorland

11 November - 4 December 2022

When Your Grandparents Were Little
To mark Remembrance Weekend, we are delighted to present Vivienne Koorland's original illustrations for When Your Grandparents Were Little [Als Eure Großeltern Jung Waren], a picture book to educate children about the Shoah, and explain a dark part of German history. Alongside the drawings, the book features a text by Judith Ida Kestenberg, a child psychiatrist who worked with Holocaust survivors.
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Published 1992, When Your Grandparents Were Little renders the Holocaust's horror and cruelty realistically, despite being intended for children from the age of three. Among other things, Koorland's black-and-white pictures, which imitate a childlike style of drawing, portray the persecution of the Jews (pages 20, 22, 23, and 26–27), massacres in concentration camps (pages 29–30), and the bloody suicide of Hitler (page 36), all quite graphically.
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Page 23
The perspective of the illustrations focuses more on the perpetrators than the victims. This choice is in line with the intentions behind the book to address the oftentimes negated, palliated, or ignored actions of the perpetrators.
However, the book ends on a positive note, showing the liberation of prisoners from the concentration camps, Jewish children returning to their regular activities, and a final, cheerful salute that reads: "No More War! No more Hitler! We are all friends!”
Vivienne KOORLAND

Manuscript: Als Eure Großeltern jung waren [When Your Grandparents Were Little], 1992

60 illustrated sheets
Oil, graphite, China pencil, wax crayon and glue on 1930s paper

Each: 27.9 x 22.9 cm

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South African artist Vivienne KOORLAND’s hand-hewn, habitually recycled paintings – along with her maps, poems, songs and stories – explore the vexed problematic of language and the impossibility of narrative in painting. Eschewing conventional objective painting practice on the one hand, and pure abstraction on the other, her representations on linen and stitched burlap of highly acculturated kitsch images of plants and animals, words, musical notes and quotations address the contested terrain of collective experience through overdetermined revisions of history, while trafficking in the tropes that signify them. Regarding herself as a de-skilled ‘History Painter’ whose project is subverting prevailing constructions of history, in a collision of accident and purpose where no trace is deemed too insignificant, she re-makes drawings, fragments and markings by often deracinated forgotten persons or unwitting artists into monumental paintings as an act of triumph and validation over rupture, ruin and annihilation.

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When Your Grandparents Were Little: Vivienne Koorland

When Your Grandparents Were Little

Vivienne KOORLAND

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