Lost Homes / to forget beautiful things

In the organizer's words:

The intervention by Israeli artist Hila Laviv links history and the present on two levels. In the work "Lost Homes / To forget beautiful things", she questions the themes of home and loss of home. Hila Laviv uses selected objects from the collection of the Altona Museum for her intervention in the farmhouse parlors and in the farmhouse model room.

The starting point and reference point for Hila Laviv's works are her grandmother Charlotte Esther Shalmon Warburg's (1922-2021) childhood memories of Hamburg and Blankenese. As a teenager, she had to flee to Sweden with her parents Anna and Fritz Warburg in 1939 and later lived in Israel. Through an artistic and at the same time personal contemporary intervention in a historical framework characterized by the national-conservative "Heimatschutzbewegung" of the 1920s, the museum thus deals with the history of Hamburg under National Socialism and with its own history.

Parallel to this intervention, the museum would also like to pay tribute to the patrons of the farmhouse models at the time, the Warburg family from Altona. While Albert Warburg died in 1919, his wife Gerta and their three daughters were victims of the Nazi regime. Gerta and daughter Betty were murdered in Sobibor in 1943, while the two daughters Ada and Helene survived the camps. Their contribution has not yet been mentioned in the museum, but their story is told in the special exhibition "Glauben und glauben lassen" (27.9.23 - 17.7.24), which is being presented at the same time.

The intervention is being developed by Hila Laviv especially for the Altona Museum and its permanent exhibition. The idea was born at an initial meeting in 2018 and was further fleshed out during further visits by Hila Laviv to Hamburg. Hila Laviv was fascinated and inspired by the Bauernstuben on her first visit, without realizing that the collection had a connection to the extended Warburg family. The dual connection between the Altonaer Museum and Hila Laviv's work - the shared interest in exploring the theme of home on the one hand and her grandmother's memories of Blankenese (in the Altona district) and the collection's connection to the Warburg family on the other - was the starting point for this site-specific and unique collaboration.