This gallery exhibit and artist's program answers how two Germans talk to each other in a post-Holocaust world when they come from a Jewish and a non-Jewish background. Karen Baldner and Björn Krondorfer explore this answer through a dialogue that not only moves through the verbal realm, but more substantially through the language of the visual arts. 

Together they have created a stunning body of work that takes on the medium of the visual book, a format rooted in the German and the Jewish traditions. Their book-objects are catalysts to their exchanges and witness the process of their intensely personal and artistic dialogue. The work they have created focuses on topics that have emerged from sharing family histories and the experience of the ‘here and now’ against the backdrop of the Shoah. 

Karen Baldner comes from a German-Jewish family persecuted during the Nazi era. She works in the media of Artist Books, addressing issues of victimization, empowerment and identity. Baldner teaches Drawing and Book Arts at Herron School of Art & Design in Indianapolis. Björn Krondorfer comes from a non-Jewish German family, grew up in Germany and is currently Director of the Martin Springer Institute and Endowed Professor of Religious Studies at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. The two met in 1992 at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and since then have cultivated a friendship based on each other’s dedication to the legacy of the post-Holocaust world, as well as larger issues related to confronting violence.