Dani Karavan, Man walking on railways

Done by the artist during the installation created for Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf (8 July – 27 August 1989), the video is a montage of sequences in which the image of a man appears as he walks down the tracks until disappearing in the distance. Complete with cross ties and ballast, the tracks end at a wall where the number of the last prisoner freed at Auschwitz appears. Karavan seems to urge us to follow the man, as an act of participation in and belonging to a painful, collective memory relived in the present – a memory that is transformed into projection and image in space, evoking a social and political context that generated what is gone. In this sense, remembrance vouchsafes a future that has no intention of forgetting.

Dani Karavan (Tel Aviv, 1930-2021). An Israeli sculptor, he always nourished a strong bond with the land, making primary, minimal structures that were welcomed into the landscape, becoming one with it. With such monumental memorials as Passages - Omaggio a Walter Benjamin (Portbou, 1990-1994); The Way of Human Rights – La via dei Diritti Umani (Nuremberg, 1993); The Sinti & Roma Memorial (Berlin, 1999-2012), Karavan’s works show a link with the history of the places, perpetuating the memory of people – and peoples – who suffered violence and discrimination.

In 1976, Karavan represented Israel at the Venice Biennale with an installation titled Ambiente per la Pace. The following year, he was invited to take part in Documenta 6 in Kassel. The artist garnered such prestigious honours as the Israel Prize (1977) and Praemium Imperiale – Nobel Prize for the arts (1998). In 2018, MEIS – Museo dell’Ebraismo Italiano e della Shoah dedicated a major exhibition to him, Il giardino che non c’è, inspired by Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.