[ Memorial Sign ]
Memorial Sign in Kurapaty
Memorial by Sergei Oganov and the artistic team, 2018
Key facts
- Location
- Minsk, Belarus
- Materials
- Wood, metal
- Height
- 23 ft
- Sculptors
- Sergei Oganov, Olga Nechay
- Architects
- Maria Markovtsova, Olga Yermolina
Introduction
The memorial sign was created at the site of mass graves of victims of political repression in the late 1930s. The exact number of those killed remains unknown.
The composition consists of four vertical supports and a bell suspended at the center. The authors sought to integrate the new memorial sign delicately into the existing landscape of Kurapaty, among the pine trees and the crosses already erected there.
Remembering the Individual
The supports bear the words “mother,” “father,” “daughter,” “sister,” and “brother” in four languages: Belarusian, Russian, Yiddish, and Polish.
In this way, the authors shifted the focus from the nationality and religion of the victims to the fate of each individual and their family.
“All those who died were, first and foremost, someone’s parents. The person who shot them was shooting someone’s mother, someone’s father.”
The bell and the words referring to family make the memorial less a narrative about a historical event than an act of remembrance for individual people whose lives were cut short.