The Survivors series of photographs is focused on ideological violence, continuously repeated throughout history, performed by different rules and regimes striving to achieve higher goals by using fire and sword and stepping over dead bodies. This is inevitably reflected in the traumatic memories and wounded bodies of their victims. The artist therefore displays a series of portraits of former WWII inmates and their attributes without emphasising explicit signs of violence visible on their bodies. However, their presence exudes a psychological substance marked by terror. Historical memory is indeed very short-lived though sometimes artificially maintained. European cultural milieu is thus charged with the remnants of suffering and death. In this spirit, Bertok discusses one’s immediate relationship and attitude towards the ideological violence of the recent past and questions binding empathy which – in past decades – has become a stipulated convention and a moral obligation of everyman.

Goran Bertok (1963) graduated from journalism at Faculty for Sociology, Political Sciences and Journalism in 1989. He is an independent artist based in Ljubljana.