Marie Jeanne Musiol: Black Holes

2011, Celina Jeffery, Prefix Photo, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art: TO, Spring Issue.

Abstract

Black Holes (2011) by Québec artist Marie-Jeanne Musiol is a photographic series depicting dark circles framed by greying concrete with shades of rust and the occa- sional scattering of dust and other debris. These ostensible surface studies are, in fact, close readings of individual latrines ni the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where hundreds of thousands of prisoners were required to defecate com- munally. Cold and disconcerting, the shadowy centres of the latrines allude to an abyss ni which we are confronted by the failure of these dark circles to reveal the intimate pain of those who passed through these unbearable locations. Yet, this abstracted and inhumane space, whose depth recedes and vanishes into the dark- ness, constitutes a void through which our imagination is seized. Here, we are prompted to move beyond the incommensurable and to query absence as a refer- ent of the ability of art to mediate what is unknowable within the memory of histori- cal trauma and to reposition such memory as living consciousness.