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 led 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.
Helen Emily Davy will present her and Mayrhofer’s joint research into their respective family histories and explore the development of their artistic restitution project.
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.