Provenance Research Seminar: Artistic Responses to Nazi Theft

As a teenager in the mid 2000s, the Austrian artist Katharina Mayrhofer found a table in the attic of her family’s inn in Aching, Upper Austria. This discovery lead her to unearth a dark chapter in her family’s history: the fervent Nazi affiliation of her great-grandfather Josef Kaltenhauser and the suspected looting of his neighbours', the Jewish Wertheimer sisters, home following the Anschluss. Many years later, Mayrhofer located descendents of the Wertheimer sisters, including the British artist Helen Emily Davy.  The meeting of Mayrhofer and Davy was the catalyst for a joint process of artistic restoration and the eventual restitution of the table to Davy's mother as a representative of the Wertheimer family. The Wertheimer table, an ordinary object with an extraordinary history, poses difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and justice.
 
Through the narratives of their two families and their extended collaborative artistic and research practices, the artists Mayrhofer and Davy will present their project as a lens through which to understand difficult pasts, the ways in which they are remembered, and our relationship to these pasts and to each other in the present.
 
Biographies
Helen Emily Davy (b. 1996, UK) is an artist, researcher, writer, and graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, the Universität für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, and the Royal College of Art. Davy works in a diverse range of media such as installation, photography, stained glass, embroidery, printmaking, and text, often incorporating archival material to examine questions related to subjectivity and the body. Her past research and artistic work has dealt with topics such as Anatomical Venus waxworks, early photography of hysteric patients, and Victorian practices of Spiritualism.

Katharina Mayrhofer (b. 1987, Austria) develops large-scale, site-specific works at the intersection of sculpture, installation and interdisciplinary practice. Her projects often explore social, ecological and cultural questions, with a strong emphasis on materiality, transformation and collaborative processes. She was educated in classical sculpture and Experimental Design at the University of Arts Linz, where she is currently a PhD candidate. Mayrhofer has exhibited internationally, including at OK Linz, Lentos Museum, Jungkunst Winterthur (CH) and Junge Kunst Passau (DE). Her award-winning works, such as I am no mushroom. I am a network and rubber grubs, reflect a critical, often playful engagement with nature, space and community.