Som Chai meets my family & friends
I am so excited that Som Chai is now in Oz and has been granted a partner visa.
He's met my family and friends, and even come along to Uni with me.
It is wonderful having him here with me - no more lonely nights or awkward outings on my own!
I can throw my wish list in the fire now because he fulfils all my dreams. I am so proud of him - he is charismatic, generous and kind, and he is also Budhist and a meditator!
I wondered whether there was a difference between art made by a human and art made by a machine? So I made a fan that painted, and I became a painting human fan.
Conclusion: there was no difference.
Just an Ordinary Peasant is based on my uncle’s experience as an inmate at Treblinka extermination camp in 1944. His memoir recounts that while being forced to carry corpses from the gas chambers to an open-air pyre, he was handed a sack which held little children who were still alive. The guard commanded the sack be thrown into the fire. The woman I play in Just an Ordinary Peasant is a hybrid character created from the memoirs of my uncle, my parents and my own research. She sings and dances and also throws a sack of babies into the fire. This piece explores my own biases as well as questions the culpability of ‘ordinary people’ who were accomplices to the atrocities carried out during the Third Reich.
Miss World Peace
in Berlin
In memory of the Book Burning
80 Years Later
There is a naïve belief that academia is immune to bigotry and the causes that students and professors lead are inherently “good causes”, even if sometimes ahead of their time.
Nothing is further from the truth.
Humboldt University in Germany was not less prestigious than today’s Colombia. In the 1920s it was a centre of liberal thinking. A decade later mobs of Humboldt students and many professors burned Jewish and other “corrupt” books in The Bebelplatz Universitätsplatz ("University Square").
Its faculty developed pseudo academic fields like race theory, eugenics and forced euthanasia. Heidelberg did have administrators, but unfortunately, it lacked moral leadership - the same lack of moral leadership we are sadly witnessing today.
Will Columbia and other universities throughout the world screaming out against Israel and the Jews, be remembered as Humboldt?
 You are not responsible for your ancestors’ crimes, but may the memorials keep the memory alive. |  ‘The Field of Steel’ 2711 Concrete Blocks |
|---|---|
 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe |  ‘The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path’ Joseph Goebbels, Speech to the students in Berlin |
 Creepy to think that Hitler stood on that balcony |  70 Years Later In memory of the Book Burning, students sell books at Humboldt University to support Freedom of Speech |
 Helmholtz Statue. He proposed ‘peace, tolerance & pacifism’ |  The Reichstag (The German Parliament) After it caught fire in 1933, the building was used for propaganda presentations and military purposes |
 Bebelplatz (formerly Opernplatz) Square Site of the Burning of the Books, 1933 Instigated by Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels Across the road from Humboldt University, Berlin |  ‘Where they have burned books, They will end in burning human beings.’ Heinrich Heine |
 Book Burning, Berlin, 1933. Students, Professors and high Nazi officials burned more then 25,000 volumes of ‘un-German’ books. |  Having a 'bowel movement' on Hitler’s Bunker |
 ‘The Death of One is a Tragedy The Death of Millions is a Statistic’ Josef Stalin |  Back to the hostel for Ms World Peace |
 ‘Friendship and Peace’ Russian and Brandenberg flags Brandenberg Gate |