Turning ancestral pain into paintings of peace
Through her exhibition Women, Pogroms, Love, artist Wendy Bookatz transforms inherited grief into light, honouring the women silenced by violence.
For Sydney artist Wendy Bookatz, art has always been a way of both confronting pain and of seeking light within it. Her upcoming exhibition, Women, Pogroms, Love, is both a personal act of remembrance and a collective call for compassion.
Bookatz’s latest body of work traces the legacy of her great-aunt Sarah Chaya Krikst, who was brutally murdered during the pogroms in Lithuania.
“My exhibition is in loving memory of Sarah Chaya Krikst. I am Wendy Chaya. I am named after her,” Bookatz told The AJN.
It was only through her son’s school project in 2005 that she learned of the atrocity that had haunted her family’s past.
“I did not know about this earth-shattering event before Sam interviewed my aunt,” she said. “When my mother’s sister was just a girl, 16 or 17, she worked for a seamstress… In the middle of the night, Cossacks attacked and raided the house. They raped and murdered Sarah Chaya and then burned the house down.”
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