Lost Baggage

More than seven decades later, the history of Lurie’s works hidden in clay pots was taken up by the Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi in his sculptural composition Lost Baggage. Copies of Lurie’s drawings hidden in five human-size ceramic vases can only be seen through small holes drilled in the pots. The artist created the vases depicting Lurie’s ‘lost baggage’ specially for the 2019 Kaunas Biennale. The composition was shown at Kaunas railway station, in the courtyard of the Kaunas Ninth Fort, and in the Museum of Cinema, Theatre and Music.

The art critic Alessandra Troncone noticed about Ridnyi's composition: ‘The images embody the dark side of Kaunas’ history and its Jewish minority. The hidden position for private evidence of the Holocaust problematises ideas of displacement, forgetting, and removal by and from official narratives in different periods of history. The monumental shape gives fragile and domestic objects a public and political dimension. The permanent location of the work, the train station in Kaunas, underlines the dramatic idea of baggage which a traveller is not allowed to take on a journey, baggage which can cost lives.’

Text author Vilma Gradinskaitė

Source: Law firm Valiunas Ellex art album STORIES OF LITVAK ART (2023). Compiler and author Vilma Gradinskaitė

More than seven decades later, the history of Lurie’s works hidden in clay pots was taken up by the Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi in his sculptural composition Lost Baggage. Copies of Lurie’s drawings hidden in five human-size ceramic vases can only be seen through small holes drilled in the pots. The artist created the vases depicting Lurie’s ‘lost baggage’ specially for the 2019 Kaunas Biennale. The composition was shown at Kaunas railway station, in the courtyard of the Kaunas Ninth Fort, and in the Museum of Cinema, Theatre and Music.

The art critic Alessandra Troncone noticed about Ridnyi's composition: ‘The images embody the dark side of Kaunas’ history and its Jewish minority. The hidden position for private evidence of the Holocaust problematises ideas of displacement, forgetting, and removal by and from official narratives in different periods of history. The monumental shape gives fragile and domestic objects a public and political dimension. The permanent location of the work, the train station in Kaunas, underlines the dramatic idea of baggage which a traveller is not allowed to take on a journey, baggage which can cost lives.’

Text author Vilma Gradinskaitė

Source: Law firm Valiunas Ellex art album STORIES OF LITVAK ART (2023). Compiler and author Vilma Gradinskaitė