Exploring the themes of persecution, flight, and exile of a Jewish family from Dresden in the works of Argentine artist Mónica Laura Weiss from Buenos Aires

WHERE: KABINETT at Zentralwerk e. V. · Riesaer Straße 32 · 01127 Dresden

WHEN:

January 9 to February 8, 2026, Thursday–Saturday 4–8 p.m.,

Sunday 3–6 p.m.

Exhibition opening: Thursday, January 8, 2026, 6 p.m.

NOTE:

Guided tours for groups and school classes are available on all weekdays from 10 a.m. by prior arrangement at: info@alter-leipziger-bahnhof.net

or at: +49 174 498 009 6!

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:

Persecution and flight did not begin with the outbreak of war by the German Wehrmacht on September 1, 1939. Hatred and incitement, exclusion, persecution, and stigmatization of supposed foreigners and those who thought differently began with the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933.

Argentinian artist Mónica Laura Weiss is the daughter, niece, and granddaughter of the Reizes family from Dresden. The family did not return to Dresden from their vacation in Marienbad in 1933. The father’s sister, Paula, had warned them about the Gestapo, who had searched Rudolf Reizes’ company for “forbidden” correspondence and foreign currency. This marked the beginning of the Jewish Reizes family’s odyssey of escape from the Nazi regime of terror via Austria and Palestine to Argentina. Paula, married name Gutmann, was able to warn her brother Rudolf’s family about the Nazi persecution, but she herself was deported from Breslau to Theresienstadt and did not survive the Shoah.

In her works, the artist processes her German-Jewish family roots and the “long shadows of the past,” as she herself calls them. Her pictures reflect motifs of persecution, flight, lost homeland, and the experiences of an existence caught between two cultures. The daughter, the artist, contrasts her mother’s life in exile from Dresden with images of her own childhood in Argentina, using documents from the family archive. Her book objects feature photographs and other documents as a backdrop for small objects and poems in German by various authors who were also forced into exile.

This exhibition is suitable for independent learning on the topics of Nazi dictatorship, using the example of the Reizes family, expulsion and flight, and exile.

With kind support by:

In cooperation with: