#historical-memory

#historical-memory

Hank Willis Thomas knows how to hold a paradox in his arms and make it shine. Jack Shainman Gallery's newly opened Tribeca flagship presents I AM MANY, Thomas' eighth exhibition with the gallery, bringing together large-scale sculptures; retroreflective, lenticular, and textile works; and a group of mixed-media assemblages. Across these forms, Thomas continues his investigation into the myriad ways the past and present remain interwovenhow legacies of exploitation and oppression echo alongside emergent architectures of community and solidarity.

For nearly 20 years, Diane Williams has seethed whenever she walked by a street mural depicting the genocide of Ohlone people by Spanish colonizers artwork she finds demeaning because the Native American men are depicted as fully nude. Just this week, plans to remove the wall art were halted at the last minute, after tenants of the building's apartments at 41st Street and Piedmont Avenue demanded that the history on display be left alone.

Lea Ypi was scrolling through social media when she stumbled across a black-and-white image of two glamorous newlyweds honeymooning at a luxury hotel in the Italian Alps. In the picture - taken in 1941, as World War II raged - a man reclines beside a woman, draped in fur and smiling warmly. Ypi recognised her instantly: it was her grandmother, Leman Leskoviku.

At first glance, these photos are nothing out of the ordinary, considering that a total of 17 million men were called up to fight in the Nazi army between 1939 and 1945. But these photos are unusual because they show citizens of Nazi-occupied Poland wearing the military uniform of the hated enemy's army.

It was underground here that, 80 years ago, one of the world's most infamous villains swallowed a cyanide capsule and fired a bullet into his brain. It was here that Adolf Hitler spent his last living moments. The site is known in German as the Fuhrerbunker, a subterranean bomb shelter that the Nazis built to protect their leader and his top henchmen from air raids during World War II.

The intensely close but complex relationship between Britain and Ireland is one that a British ambassador to Ireland observed in a 1977 dispatch: the British "take the Irish for granted, whereas (the Irish) are obsessed with us. We don't remember the past and they cannot forget it." If we think a lot about that relationship, one might think that there would be no need for a book like Philip Stephens's These Divided Isles. Too often we don't think deeply about our relationship with Britain.

In this episode of Centre Stage, our guest is a Jewish historian of Palestine, Zach Foster. He joins us to discuss his work on preserving Palestinian maps and archival materials, despite the deliberate destruction of archives by Israel. Foster explains his journey from growing up in a Zionist household to advocating for the rights and history of Palestinians. Phil Lavelle is a TV news correspondent at Al Jazeera.