Dissent and Displacement
Introduction
In Dissent and Displacement Monica Petzal takes on the oldest of journeys; people leaving their homeland because of persecution and war, and turns it into a story that never ends.
Using her own family’s experience, Petzal forces us to see what gets missed, where longing lies, and how the search for home, and the comfort of home, never really ends. And yet, more refugees arrive, Syrians, East African Asians from Uganda, Congolese, Eritreans, and more and more. And each group, each wave, has both a separate story to tell, and the same story to tell. In this exhibition, we begin to share in the emotions of the displaced as well as understanding how a host community can
reach out and provide comfort. In this exhibition we see people of conscience asking us all to help, to stretch out a hand to the oppressed and to identify with Leicester in particular, home to so many refugees and migrants, and home too to dissent from prevailing orthodoxies, and a place of welcome. Leicester was the birthplace of George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers), famous for their work with refugees, asylum seekers and displaced people. And it is also the birthplace of Alice Hawkins, a famous suffragette, looking at freedom and freedom of conscience in a different way. Leicester has stretched out its arms time and again to wave after
wave of migrants. And they have, eventually, called it home.
This exhibition challenges conventional thinking about refugees. They never forget their original home. They long for it and often behave as they would have done in their countries of birth. But they do it in a new way, and their habits morph, their patterns of behaviour morph, until gradually they are absorbed into a new society, welcomed or tolerated, newly at home, though perhaps never wholly secure. Admission to a new country and a welcome, rejection and toleration, experience overlaid with experience, the morphing of ideas of home; all these are shown in Petzal’s exhibition and all her
prints challenge us, the viewers, to think again what displacement means to those who experience it and to those who come after them.
Rabbi Baroness Neuberger DBE (2020)
Dissent and Displacement is about narrative and testament, identity and memory. It is about how we construct and interpret history and how we create meaning. Retelling our stories helps us understand
who we are and offers a space in which to consider how to move forward.
There was a bookshelf in our house devoted to unopened transcripts of the Nurnberg Trials and Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War. We did not need to open the books; the shadow of my parents’ displacement, the Holocaust and World War II fell over so much of our daily life.
We were enveloped in memory and ritual. Our suburban house had been refashioned to look like the ‘Bauhaus’. We ate apple strudel off Rosenthal china with silver cutlery. My brothers and I played the Blüthner grand piano and heard Schubert lieder on the gramophone. My mother translated and taught German, a language she loved and used with her husband and all their social circle. Being Jewish did not figure as a religious practice, but as a cultural identity. My parents were enduringly grateful for the refuge that Britain had offered them, considered themselves highly assimilated, and yet fondly referred to ‘the English’ as people who were entirely different from them.
This upbringing was, of course, on a collision course with growing up in London in the 1950s and 1960s. I did my utmost to detach myself from it, turning into a rebellious teenager and student. It has taken almost fifty years of life experience for me to seriously reevaluate the significance of my history and capture the stories that I have woven into the images that follow.
I first came to Leicester in 1994 for an exhibition of the work of Conrad Felixmüller, to which I had lent the work owned by my grandparents. Leicester had also managed to borrow a privately owned Felixmüller painting of my grandmother, Sofie, which I had never seen: my grandfather had sold it in the 1960s. It was very odd to gaze at a painting of a woman I never knew, but whom I so closely resembled, down to the squint. I have returned regularly to see the developing collection and the more I learned of the history of those who contributed towards it, the more the stories grew
in my imagination.
Making prints is about the interaction of ideas and process. My way of working, which is slow, allows thoughts to change and develop. My research, because not everything is digital, has involved various boxes of letters, documents and photos that I inherited, visits to libraries and record offices, and chance conversations. It has included journeys to Germany, Holland and Belgium, to many places where I was pleased to be, but to some where I could not bear to linger. It has been the most absorbing of projects. It has changed me, and there is more work to be done.
Monica Petzal (2020)
‘Dissent and Displacement’, is an exhibition commissioned by Leicester Museums, about storytelling; history, memory and how we reflect on our lives. It explores opposition, persecution and persistence inspired by the artists German Jewish refugee heritage and the Leicester German Expressionist art collection. Interweaving threads of family, politics, culture and art, it uses original sources, to bring together contemporary, painterly lithographic prints with accessible descriptive text.
As Baroness Julia Neuberger wrote in the forward to the book of the exhibition:
“In Dissent and Displacement Petzal takes on the oldest of journeys; people leaving their homeland because of persecution and war and turns it into a story that never ends.” This exhibition challenges conventional thinking about refugees.
Admission to a new country and a welcome, rejection and toleration, experience overlaid with experience, the morphing of ideas of home; all these are shown in Petzal’s exhibition, and all her prints challenge us, the viewers, to think again what displacement means to those who experience it and to those who come after them.”
