As a teenager in the mid 2000s, the Austrian artist Katharina Mayrhofer found a table in the attic of her family’s inn in Aching, Upper Austria. This discovery lead her to unearth a dark chapter in her family’s history: the fervent Nazi affiliation of her great-grandfather Josef Kaltenhauser and the suspected looting of his neighbours', the Jewish Wertheimer sisters, home following the Anschluss. Many years later, Mayrhofer located descendents of the Wertheimer sisters, including the British artist Helen Emily Davy. The meeting of Mayrhofer and Davy was the catalyst for a joint process of artistic restoration and the eventual restitution of the table to Davy's mother as a representative of the Wertheimer family. The Wertheimer table, an ordinary object with an extraordinary history, poses difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and justice.

Through the narratives of their two families and their extended collaborative artistic and research practices, the artists Mayrhofer and Davy will present their project as a lens through which to understand difficult pasts, the ways in which they are remembered, and our relationship to these pasts and to each other in the present.

Their exhibition Looted: Two Families, Nazi Theft and the Search for Restitutionis on view at the Wiener Holocaust Library until 10 October 2025.

Booking: For tickets and information click HERE

Venue: Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington