Collection > ZORAN MUŠIČ
REGISTER OF CORPSES

1974

Original prints, illustrated book (7 lithographs)

44 x 54 cm

Inv. št. G 552/4



“Even today, the eyes of the dying haunt me like hundreds of piercing needles, which kept following me as I jumped across and tried to make my way through them. Those glistening eyes, wordlessly begging for help from someone who could still walk. It was in the last days of internment and these dying people were the remnants of transports, herded here from other distant camps on foot. And they were brought here so they would not die by the side of the road. In the evening, they died as well, and even those who only looked dead were piled on a heap like logs, like for a bonfire, almost like a tower. A horrific tower that moved, I could almost say creaked, if I hadn’t known that these were just the final moans of the dying.” (Zoran Mušič, for the exhibition in Palazzo Attems in Gorizia, 2004) With his cycle of paintings and prints under the common title We Are Not the Last in the 1970s, Mušič revived his traumatic memories of his experience of a Nazi [concentration/death] camp and poured it into a shocking artistic message. The creatures, deformed in silent screams, have since been the most frequent reference for Mušič’s human figures. With a great ethical surplus, these images reflect the futility of human life, one all but diminished beyond any possible testimony visual or textual.

Text: Marko Košan

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