"Art of Darkness"
If visual beauty can make sense out of chaos for us and assuage our dismay, does it perhaps sing a little too sweetly, and with an unsuitably distracting loudness? To me, beauty's deflection of darkness disquiets my soul by the very way in which it balms my sense of shock and offence. As the Nazi's understood, even the blackest obscenity can take a civilizing veil, can be ennobled by the right bunting and discreet lighting and a shiva chorus of tearful remembrance.
Even so, to spot something beautiful standing defiant amidst and against depraved darkness sometimes helps, if only a little, to restore a semblance of one's own ordered humanity, surviving almost miraculously in the long shadow of the beast.
TITLE - "Art of Darkness"
WHERE - Holocaust Memorial, Berlin (2015)