President's Showcase
Zephaniah Malka she/her
Supervising Professor: Carrie Ann Baade
Zephaniah Malka is a senior at FSU pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Arts with focus areas in Painting and Moving Image. Malka's portfolio largely consists of mixed media stop-motion animation works. She has accumulated over 58,000 followers, 4 million likes, and 20 million views across platforms displaying her art and has previously been commissioned by artists under Republic Records and Darkroom Records. She has an interest in using social media as a means of connecting the public to the art world.
Abstract
Charlotte Salomon was a Jewish artist killed during the Holocaust. Before her death, she was able to ensure the safe-keeping of her magnum opus: her semi-fictional autobiography, Life? Or Theatre?. The work consists of nearly 800 gouache paintings with accompanying writings and songs, telling her life story during the rise of Nazi Germany. This project aims to counter growing antisemitic rhetoric and Holocaust denialism by highlighting a Jewish artist who experienced the reality of the Holocaust and whose seminal work tracks, in real-time, the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. By summarizing her semi-autobiographical work in sections and putting it on public platforms I hope to increase its accessibility. I hope to also counter the growing apathy, denial, and detachment that is exhibited towards violent events and their victims by displaying a personal account of this atrocity. I hope to reach a wider audience and popularize Salomon’s story by creating easily consumable stop-motion videos, disrupting the constant influx of disinformation and desensitization at the source of its algorithmic origin.
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