Love is not an emotion. Love is an electromagnetic energy field … when love functions, there is no subjugator nor the subjugated.” – Sniedze Rungis on radical love according to the teaching of Jesus Christ. 

 Sniedze Rungis: Art as Activism and Antidote

 

by Jeanette Lee

 

Art as activism depends on the artist. Sniedze Rungis’ “current response to a damaging epidemic in our country” (that is, the plague of pornography and the sex industry: a multi-billion-dollar profit-making venture) is Survivor (Stations of the Cross). Survivor is an artist’s book conceptualized as a Holocaust memorial by Sniedze and photographed by James Riegel.

Sniedze’s art creates connections to this “contemporary spiritual holocaust” and confronts the question: How do we approach this issue without allowing it to consume us? Sniedze says, “We can do something about it if we join together, as always.”

Sniedze’s parents fled their homeland of Latvia to escape the Soviet army during WWII. Sniedze was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. When Sniedze was six months old, her family emigrated to Midwestern United States. Sniedze and her family maintained their roots in Latvian culture and heritage (Sniedze speaks, reads and writes in Latvian and is a well-known artist and poet in the Latvian community) while developing new roots in Michigan. Sniedze’s art, like Survivor, is informed by her family’s loss and displacement because of the Soviet occupation of Latvia.

Survivor is a dramatized and photographed recreation of a woman’s journey through a Third Reich death camp. The woman (portrayed by Sniedze) is naked – like the millions that passed through the industrialized mass murder system. She is captured in movements symbolically replicating the Stations of the Cross, while following the path of a Holocaust victim through the death camp. “If people choose to view this in a salacious manner, they need to seek professional help,” the artist states.

 

Survivor originated with Sniedze’s desire to differentiate the erotic spark of art from the flat perversion of pornography. The project opens with an introduction by Sniedze, next to a copy of a photograph from a pogrom in Lemberg, Austria in 1942. In the image we see an unprotected woman: she is naked, seated on the cement, surrounded by German functionaries – all fully-clothed males. Survivor is dedicated to this anonymous woman.

The sequential experience of the photos reminds the viewer the body is the soul’s friend, its sanctuary. While creating Survivor, Sniedze intentionally invoked images of Buddha’s face – “retaining consciousness even in hell.” In addition to the facial expressions of Sniedze, the soul in Survivor is visually evident by intentional points of light in the black and white photographs. 

The hand-crafted wooden boxes (marked with black numbers, 0001, 0002, 0003, 0004)  housing the Survivor folio replicate Trench Art, which is art made with objects collected from areas of military conflict. Folios 0001, 0002 and 0004 are distributed amongst the Occupation Museum of Riga, Latvia; The Moscow Holocaust Museum; and the Detroit Holocaust Memorial Center. Folio 003 is currently in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  Inside each box is a reptilian-leather-clad book. Sniedze chose the silvery-black leather because it was reminiscent of the leather employed in the visually imposing SS trench coats. Inside the box, to the left of the book, is a small compartment containing a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and a pair of white gloves stained with red, creating the aura of an exhumation. 

Sniedze is interested in developing a theatrical tour with a potential Survivor exhibit. By incorporating spoken word with her artist’s book, she hopes to elucidate the present pornography pandemic plaguing our nation and it’s correlation with the Holocaust.

How is the epidemic use of pornography akin to the danger of the Holocaust? In both humans are objectified in order to provide a rush of power to the perpetrator. Pornography desensitizes to acts of dehumanization--the same brain washing process used by the Nazis preceding and during the Holocaust.

Sniedze notes both women’s and men’s attitudes toward modesty, how it used to be: for a woman, modesty was not only protection, but an inner attitude. And a man’s greatest strength is gentleness. At the root of society’s complacency to dehumanization, “is our separation from nature and our natural being.’ Referring to the epidemic of ‘sexting,’ she says, “We seem not to be able to teach our children that their bodies are sacred.”