The Anne Frank Series: My personal Journey

By Iris Anne Berger

Educated at Camberwell College of Art and Reading University

In so many ways paintings tell stories, helping viewers to construct narratives of meaning, inviting them to think and feel in terms of 'correspondences' between their own experiences and those they 'recognize' in the painting.

Art also creates journeys which lead us to new uncharted waters - in our minds and in our feelings. This experiential odyssey helps us cross to other social and psychological shores - to other lives - unlike our own. In both ways art becomes the special bridge for dialogical encounters, drawing people from different backgrounds, different life-chances or dreams, together across divides of 'lived experience' towards shared meanings and the communication of common visions in the campaign against oppression, subjugation, silence…

This is the vision underpinning my art. It is an art with origins in a locale and specific context – London of my youth. I still recall the terrible images of the twisted, skeletal bodies in the Nazi camps which I saw for the first time through news-photography, later books. Media technologies brought me face to face with the horrors of the Nazi Genocide when I was 11. When I was an adult I wanted my art to reach out and deal with the themes of suffering and oppression.