Golden Rose
July - December 2015
Near City Arsenal (Staroievreiska str. 37-39)
As part of the commemoration project "The Space of Synagogues: Jewish History, Common Heritage and Responsibility" The Golden Rose exhibition by photographer Jason Francisco is installed.
It is a visual and textual meditation on time, loss, and memory in connection with the site of once one of Europe's most famous synagogues. When Francisco came to the ruins of the Golden Rose for the first time, he was struck by the contrast between the synagogue's multi-century history and the empty space behind a crude metal fence he saw. The exhibition invites viewers to look behind it and reflect together on the present, past and future of this place.
In his project implemented in 2014, the photographer combines large-format photography, drawing, and writing. The black and white photographs show the building's present, while the chalk drawings depict imagined vision of the synagogue before the war. The project holds a contradiction between the perceived and real Golden Rose. The Mourner, a character that appears in the essay, speaks the voice of the author as well as of the destroyed community that used to live here.
Jason Francisco
is an acclaimed photo artist, essayist, curator, and educator. His projects are long-term works on Jewish historical memory in Eastern Europe and North America. He is the author of numerous exhibitions, including Un Unfinished Memory: Jewish Heritage and the Holocaust in Eastern Galicia at the Galicia Jewish Museum, Krakow. Francisco lives in the USA. He is a lecturer at Emory University and Stanford University (USA). He is the author of innumerable articles on photography and visual culture as well as a photo critic.
