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
Archival Family Footage
Part 2 presents a family home movie in a forest outside Melbourne. It shows my
parents and their friends — Holocaust survivors— together with me as a young
girl.
This footage shows how dance, and my parents’ approach to life, became part of my own life. As a child, I was always present as they danced. As an adult, it seemed natural to bring together these two formative influences — their history and that of dance — hence the title, ‘Dancing Auschwitz’.
The work is accompanied by Leonard Cohen’s song Dance Me To the End of Love, chosen for its poetic power and its references to the orchestras at Auschwitz, forced to play as prisoners were led to their deaths.
 The Circle of Life |  My parents, Marysia & Adolek Kohn, always dancing |
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 The artist as a child. Always dancing |