Here
Lived
A film by Monica Petzal
Here Lived is a short (25 minute) film which follows the late, German Jewish Petzal Family. Beginning with the laying of Stolpersteine, memorial ‘stumbling’ stones for the dead, it retraces their lives from a modest apartment in central Berlin, to exile in Holland, betrayal and deportation to the Dutch Kamp Westerbork, two years in Westerbork including the birth of twins, a further deportation for eight months to Theresienstadt and finally deportation to their deaths in Auschwitz.
Displacement
Dissent and
Exhibition
‘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.
To a Death in
Sweating Wakefulness
Monica Petzal, Jo Love, Dawn Cole
An exhibition about the artist father Harry Petzal, it focuses on a 1946 business trip to Germany with associates, to identify the detritus of war and organise the sale of scrap metal to the USA. A recent refugee and British Army veteran, who had lost all his immediate family in the Holocaust, Petzal meticulously photographed and identified his travels.
Indelible
Marks
The Dresden Project
The Dresden Project focuses on the experience of the artists maternal family, the German Jewish Isakowitz family who fled antisemitism in Eastern Prussia to settle in Dresden in 1924, only to be forced to flee to England from National Socialism in 1936. It uses the testimony of renowned diarist Victor Klemperer, and the work of their friend the artist Conrad Felixmüller to illustrate the situation. It then considers the ongoing tragedy of the Nazi’s and of Dresden, the 1945 bombing, the role of Bomber Harris and the continuing division and violence in contemporary Dresden.
Dresden Towers
Coventry
Monica Petzal
75/70: The Coventry Dresden Towers were made in response to the cathedrals interest in the Dresden Project. Recognising the exhibition as not appropriate to the cathedral space, I created a site-specific installation to reflect the scale and significance of the cathedral and address the subject matter of the 75th anniversary of the bombing and Coventry’s relationship with Dresden.