The exhibition grows out of the personal experience of artist Andrea Wanko, who has chosen to open up her own family history—one shaped by Czech–German roots, Nazism, and the post-war events in Brno. A topic that for a long time in her family was bound up with silence and fear becomes the starting point of a journey towards understanding herself and the wider historical context.
The impulse is a simple yet urgent question: to what extent are our personality and inner life shaped by the experiences of our ancestors? Andrea decides to stop being afraid and, for the first time, actively enter the complex story of her family. Through therapy, spiritual accompaniment, visual art-making, archival research, conversations with witnesses, and returns to sites of memory, she gradually explores how unresolved history is reflected in identity, relationships, and everyday lived experience.
“Unresolved past is destiny; it repeats itself until we find the courage to face it together. Trauma resonates through a family until someone in the next generation has the circumstances, capacity, resources, and courage to meet it and its consequences within themselves—to digest it and heal it, for themselves, for their ancestors, and for future generations.”
Thomas Hübl, PhD, specialist in the integration of collective trauma
The exhibition follows this journey as a process—not as a finished explanation, but as an open-ended search in which healing happens slowly and quietly, through relationships, creativity, and sharing, moving toward the release of what is carried across generations. It makes this process visible as a movement taking place within an individual, between generations, and between people. Accepting contradictions, naming pain, and sharing experience become essential tools of understanding. This is not about justification or condemnation, but about an attempt to understand one’s ancestors—to accept them with all their decisions and the consequences that reach into the present. Part of this journey is also the willingness to go further: beneath the surface of the family story and into deeper layers of one’s inner world.
The project opens the Czech–German theme through a specific human story and makes space for the complexity of the past without simplification or moral labelling. The exhibition forms part of a broader multidisciplinary artistic, therapeutic, and educational project that connects personal memory, art, therapy, historical research, and public dialogue. The project also includes a time-lapse documentary film, an accompanying publication rooted in the therapeutic process, and educational programmes, workshops, discussions, and meetings for schools and the wider public. Its aim is to inspire individuals, educators, and institutions to work sensitively with family memory—and to show that understanding the past is not weakness but courage, and that even an experience that divides can become the beginning of encounter, learning, and reconciliation.
Curatorial team: Markéta Brhlíková, Andrea Wanko
Project team: Markéta Brhlíková, Andrea Wanko, Veronika Smyslová, Šárka Weberová, Karolína Poláčková, Ester Švábková
The exhibition will be on view until 30 June 2026 at Moravské náměstí (Moravian Square).
