“Eugenic Minds” Exhibition
Czech Center New York / The Bohemian National Hall
This event has ended.
The exhibition Eugenic Minds is comprised of animations and paintings by Xenie Hoffmeisterová, documentary by Pavel Stingl, and literary artwork by Patrik Ourednik.
The exhibition offers a timeless meditation upon the abuse of the human pinnacles of science and education. Secondly, it addresses the question of academic careerism, which under totalitarian regimes reaches self-destructive proportions. The moving documentary, animations, and artwork delve into the definition of science and the situations when learning becomes a pseudo-science. The exhibition also uses historical sources regarding the dominant theme of the first half of the 20th century, centered on the Nazi era. Nazism here is not only an inexhaustible fount of drama from the time when the value of human being or not-being was seriously deformed, but it also provides examples of propaganda capable of visualizing a subject in an unprecedented manner.
Film Screening: Eugenic Minds, documentary by Pavel Stingl, 73 min, 2013, 8:00 P.M.
During World War II, the Nazis built scientific centers in Prague to implement their vision of a world shaped by race, biology and hygiene. Eugenic Minds traces the twisted ideology of a totalitarian regime that wanted to use race and biology to determine the rank of an individual in society, and the tragic results that followed.
http://www.eugeniove.cz/en/trailer-en/showreel
About the artist: Xenia Hoffmeisterova is a Slovak artist who lives and works in Prague. She regularly exhibits in the Czech Republic and abroad. Xenia lent her visual esthetic to Pavel Stingl’s documentary film Eugenic Minds.
About the director: Pavel Stingl is a Czech award-winning documentary filmmaker, and founder of Shoah Memorial Prague, an organization founded in 2012, whose mission is to complete a center for contemporary history, The Memorial of Silence. It is dedicated to the memory of Jewish transports from Praha-Bubny train station to Terezin and Lodz concentration camps, and is being built at the site of the original train station. Stingl will be present to discuss his film and the memorial project on February 24th and 26th.
Media
Schedule
from January 27, 2015 to February 26, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-01-28 from 18:30 to 20:30