Private View Tuesday 17 April, 7-9pm
**The exhibition is on view from Tuesday 3 April (closed over Easter holidays).

Two small photographs found in a suitcase belonging to her great uncle, Hugo Hecker, formed the starting point for this exhibition by the photographer Julia Winckler. The suitcase had witnessed Hugo’s escape, in the summer of 1939, from Vienna to England. Hugo’s family perished in the Shoah, the two photographs constituting their last visual traces. Only two brothers and two nieces survived, separated forever. In his lifetime, Hugo, traumatised by the war, had remained silent about the loss of his family. Winckler began the project as a means of preventing the memory of the Hecker family becoming erased from history.

The Traces exhibition is presented in three sections: Witnessing attempts to preserve the family’s memory; Searching captures Winckler’s journey to Poland to find traces of their lives there, Preserving holds on to the few inherited objects and documents for their potential to provide testimony as to what happened to the Hecker family and countless others that shared their fate. The exhibition consists of a series of large-scale multi-layered photographs and a short film, made in collaboration with the artist Nerea Martinez de Lecea. Professor Edward Timms (Prof. emeritus, University of Sussex, Centre for German Jewish Studies) will make a short presentation introducing the themes of the exhibition at the private view.

A selection of the work has previously been exhibited in at the Maison Heinrich Heine, Paris; the KZ Gedenkstätte Oberer Kuhberg, Ulm; the Schlatterhaus, Tübingen, and the Wiener Library, London. The film first premiered at the Brighton Jewish Film Festival.

Accompanying events include:

An Evening in Memory of Polish Jews
15 May, 7pm, ACF London

"Out of Austria': Remembering the Austrian Centre
22 May, 7pm, ACF London

Working with Traces, Memory & Archives
31 May, 7pm, ACF London