Peeler Art Center Presents Remnants: by Krista Svalbonas
By Mabel Lawler - May 16, 2023
The main floor of DePauw’s Peeler Art Center currently houses Remnants, an exhibit by Krista Svalbonas, which takes spectators on a visual journey through the experiences of post-World War II refugees through portraits, projections, interviews, and architecture.
Svalbonas is an American artist of Latvian and Lithuanian descent whose parents were World War II refugees. Svalbonas’s parents found themselves displaced in Germany after the war, living in displaced person camps for several years before eventually emigrating to the United States.
Fueled by her connection to her parents’ experiences, Svalbonas uses the themes of architecture and language to demonstrate the relationship between politics and architecture and how architecture can psychologically impact people's everyday lives.
Svalbonas’s collection at Peeler features two of her recent works, both focusing on the history of the Baltic states surrounding World War II, specifically, the German displacement camps, and the lived experiences of the refugees that inhabited them.
The centerpiece of Svyalbonas’s exhibit is her array of 3D-printed portraits of buildings, made up of a collection of letters. To create these pieces, Svalbonas traveled to Germany to locate and photograph the former locations of the displaced person camps that her parents and other refugees once inhabited. Then, she gathered archived copies of plea letters sent by the Baltic refugees to the governments of Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, containing countless pleas for food, bedding, medical supplies and asylum. Svyalbonas then used the words of these plea letters to create portraits of the former displaced person housing units. Finally, she laser cut her creations into 3D-printed pieces. The end result is delicate, lace-like architectural portraits that echo the painful accounts of the Baltic refugee’s lived experiences. Sylvonas entitles these specific pieces What Remains (1-13).
“We got to tour this exhibit as part of my World War II political science class,” says sophomore Grace Heinle. “When I first looked at the What Remains pieces, I didn’t notice the letters or that it was even 3D-printed.” Heinle said when she looked closer, she realized that what she thought was just a picture of a building was actually telling a story. “It had so much more to it than I had first imagined,” she said.
