Against Forgetting: Beyond Genocide & Civil War

How do refugees escaping from countries in turmoil adapt to their new environments? Will images of Auschwitz ever mean anything to those denying the Holocaust? Can culture outlast genocide? These questions and others surface in Against Forgetting, Intermedia Arts’ exhibit of three photographers who pursue parallel imagery of civilized horrors.

St. Paul native Mike Rosen always includes a camera on his extensive travels. On a recent trip to Europe, he was moved to capture the cold gas chambers and dilapidated crematoriums of Birkenau and Auschwitz in Poland. Here he presents images of museum installations of informational panels and artwork that other artists were inspired to create about the Holocaust.

One of his saddest pieces is a large black and white photograph of empty canisters. These tins, long since void of the potent chemicals that simultaneously killed tens of thousands of people in concentration camp gas chambers, are now hulking piles of discarded husks—rusted and silent like the many innocent victims their contents mercilessly claimed. Rosen effectively captures the dismal conditions of the camps and presents them with dark and irreversible simplicity.
Another tale of mass genocide is depicted in the work of Paul Corbit Brown, a former contributor to the Washington Post. His photographs capture modern-day Rwanda and the killings that devastated hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians without dominating the U.S. media. Not that the murders go completely unnoticed; they just fail to garner the same attention or influence as Super Bowl product ads.

Brown’s work siphons through imagery of poverty, skulls and human emotion straining to find hope. In this show, most of his work is presented as part of a slide show, interspersed with captions and quotes from humanitarian luminaries and other figures. The slide show lends the feel of a family vacation, as if the images were captured by a shutterbug tourist, and highlights the fact that the subjects are regular people, not merely scenes of the disenfranchised.

Abdi Roble is a photographer whose work is a part of the Somali Documentary Project. Since political instability has ravished Somalia, hundreds of thousands of native people have sought shelter and employment in other nations. Minneapolis is home to the largest Somali population outside that country, adding a local feel to work, which was shot in Columbus, Ohio. In this exhibit, Roble shows how Somali refugees struggle to assimilate into America while maintaining elements of their own culture.

His images read like a photo album, and Roble provides captions for each piece. One of the best is “Going Home,” which shows a contemplative young man named Mohamed Mohamed waiting for a bus. Long shadows are cast on the wall at his back and other figures are blurred as Mohamed stares quietly at the ground. ||

Against Forgetting: Beyond Genocide and Civil War runs through April 1 at Intermedia Arts, 2822 Lyndale Ave. S., Mpls., 612-871-4444. Gallery hours are Mon.–Sat. noon to 5 p.m.