Som Chai meets my family & friends
I am so excited that Som Chai is now in Oz and has been granted a partner visa.
He's met my family and friends, and even come along to Uni with me.
It is wonderful having him here with me - no more lonely nights or awkward outings on my own!
I can throw my wish list in the fire now because he fulfils all my dreams. I am so proud of him - he is charismatic, generous and kind, and he is also Budhist and a meditator!
I wondered whether there was a difference between art made by a human and art made by a machine? So I made a fan that painted, and I became a painting human fan.
Conclusion: there was no difference.
Just an Ordinary Peasant is based on my uncle’s experience as an inmate at Treblinka extermination camp in 1944. His memoir recounts that while being forced to carry corpses from the gas chambers to an open-air pyre, he was handed a sack which held little children who were still alive. The guard commanded the sack be thrown into the fire. The woman I play in Just an Ordinary Peasant is a hybrid character created from the memoirs of my uncle, my parents and my own research. She sings and dances and also throws a sack of babies into the fire. This piece explores my own biases as well as questions the culpability of ‘ordinary people’ who were accomplices to the atrocities carried out during the Third Reich.
Dancing Auschwitz
Love, Hate & Healing
In January, 2010, I uploaded I Will Survive: Dancing Auschwitz. Part 1 to YouTube. Months later, after I removed the quotation marks around the title, it went viral, receiving nearly 700,000 views in ten days before being removed due to a copyright infringement.
The global response was overwhelming. Initially neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups from Hungary, The Netherlands, Russia and the United States sent waves of hate mail. Others criticised the work as inappropriate, arguing that it trivialised the victims’ suffering and broke a taboo of celebrating at sacred sites. Yet far more people responded with messages of support, empathy and gratitude.
Most unexpectedly, many wrote to say the work had helped them process the emotional weight of the past—that it allowed them to laugh, cry, and, in some cases, experience a profound sense of healing.
The collected email responses reveal a wide spectrum of human reaction.
The following pages present a selection of these emails, arranged into Love, Hate and Healing.
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