Artist Statement

This surrealist/expressionist art piece was created as a time-based digital work using abstract photographs and concrete memories! The production of this animation was inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of the “holocaust” and the realization that surviving eye-witnesses to this horrendous event were getting scarce. Time was running out; I could no longer postpone depicting my own memories of this historic event. But the perspective of time allowed some compression of events and blending personal remembrances with the relatives’ direct experience. Being an artist of still pictures has always meant putting the whole of the expression into one single frame. Using the revolutionary versatility of the new art tools has enabled me to express a memory in which duration was tantamount: the five years that’s lasted forever! This new time-based method enabled me to create something that transcends media specifics and synchronizes earlier graphics with new techniques to recreate the mood of the unforgettable and inexorable eastward motion of the “final solution”. This composition was completed in May 1997. It will now debut in the country to which we desperately tried to escape in May 1940!

• Josepha Haveman, NL/US, can best be described today as a media artist. She has created art in a variety of traditional media, first from painting and photography to printmaking and then with various computer based graphics, a field she started to explore shortly after her fiftieth birthday! Ms. Haveman’s special academic focus is in the inter-relationship between media, culture and society throughout its development, from pre-historic times into the future. Josepha grew up -and first studied art- in Amsterdam, then pursued a degree in art and anthropology at San Francisco State University, followed by graduate work in cultural anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley while also working as a staff member at the Museum of Anthropology there. Since then Prof. Haveman has also received an advanced degree in art and has taught photography as fine art at academies, colleges and universities in California, Oregon, Israel, and Europe. Her work, especially her photography and early digital art, has been exhibited widely at galleries and museums in various countries. Josepha Haveman has been exploring the potentials of digital media in art, design, and education using personal computers, since 1981. She also has been producing CD ROMs on art, anthropology and the environment resulting in eleven discs of art, photography and educational subjects published between 1990 and 1996.
  A complete resumé, much more information plus an overview of her pictorial work, can be found at Haveman’s extensive web site.
  web.archive.org/web/20070302110741/http://www.illuminated.com/JH_ArtArchive