Waldsee 1944

International group exhibition | 2B Gallery, Budapest | October–November 2024

Bringing together visual artists and composers, the project explores how artistic responses to historical documents can sustain remembrance and confront the distance between recorded messages and lived experience.

Initiated in 2004, Waldsee 1944 responds to postcards that Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau were forced to send to their relatives. Written under coercion, these messages falsely reassured recipients about the senders’ safety. The misleading place name “Waldsee” concealed their actual location, turning an ordinary form of personal correspondence into an instrument of deception.

The project invites artists to respond through postcard-format works. The small scale of these contributions retains the intimacy of correspondence while opening it to public reflection. A format ordinarily associated with travel, everyday encounters and connection becomes a means of addressing absence, persecution and loss. Through this shared format, individual artistic responses form an expanding collection concerned with the responsibilities of remembering and the limits of representation.

The 2024 exhibition presented earlier contributions alongside 42 new postcards and newly commissioned musical compositions, extending the project’s dialogue between visual art, sound and historical testimony.