Familial Ground is an installation that includes digitally manipulated self-portraits about  identity and a familial and cultural history that has been subject to dislocation and extinction. My work is about gathering and connecting scattered fragments from the past  while acknowledging the impossibility of retrieval.   My self-portraits are detailed re-enactments of ancestral figures linked to remembrance and the poetic language of mourning through self-portraiture and the conventions of family portraiture.  In re-enacting ancestral others through a relationship of resemblance the self-portraits suggest that we look at family photographs in order to recognize ourselves in the 'trace' left by our ancestors.  

Familial Ground is the product of a process that started when my son was born.  In part this is an attempt to pass on to him a familial  inheritance as I have become aware of how little I knew about this history. While I could access existing stores of knowledge about Eastern European Jewish life, knowledge of the pre-Holocaust lives of my grandparents and their families only exists in fragments deeply buried within the memories of elderly relatives and relatives now gone.  

I am now the carrier of some of those memories.

Rafael Goldchain