The international exhibition project: Last Folio is inspired by the personal story of the family of one of its creators – Yuri Dojc, a photographer, who emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1968 soon after the invasion of Prague by the Soviet troops.
In 1997 during the funeral of his father Yuri Dojc got acquainted with a woman who had experienced all the horrors of the Holocaust. That story of one person originated a big project-research in Slovakia, there the photographer travelled to collect living evidences of those who had witnessed the Second World War and artifacts of the eastern European Jewish community before it was too late. The portrait gallery of the survived prisoners of the concentration camps and told by them stories, photos of destroyed synagogues, cemeteries and survived fragments of the way of life of the pre-war days became for Yuri Dojc the personified evidence of the collective memory about the Catastrophe which influenced the history of the photographer’s family as well.
His journey in search of the documents connected the wildest crime of the 20th century led Yuri Dojc to an abandoned elementary school in Bardeev which is in the northeast of the country. There he found hundreds of books from the school library. The interior of the closed area and its details were kept from the prewar period. Those begrimed with dust books forgotten in the prayer’s room of that Jewish school for more than half a century became the main heroes of the series for Yuri Dojc, in which still-life photography is turning into a portrait one and cultural heritage becomes ‘living’ witness of the tragedy.
His aspiration to collect – photo by photo – the history of the nation which is hiding the unknown pages of his own family story led him to a miraculous discovery – he found a book stamped «Jakab Dojc, a tailor, Mikhailovets» among those ruins. That was the book with the home library stamp of the artist’s grandfather whom Yuri Dojc saw on the photo from the family archive. During the occupation Jakab with thousands of other prisoners was sent to Auschwitz and he never returned back.
The found book became a logical end of that big journey which resulted in a multimedia project: Last Folio, the series of photos of Yuri Dojc and a documentary of Kate Krausova.
This exhibition is only a part of a bigger project which was first shown in the Slovak National Museum in Bratislava and which is already more than ten years long.
Then it was a success in Prague, Cambridge, Brussels, New York, Rome, and Vienna. The project was shown as a part of the Kosice program (Slovakia) – the cultural capital of Europe in 2013. In 2015 on the even of the 70th anniversary of the Second World War end the exhibition will participate in the global memorable events and will be exhibited in the building of the UN in New York, Mark Rothko Art Center in Daugavpils, at the National Library, Berlin, at the Taft Museum of Art in Boston. Some works from the exhibition are already the property of the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington.