Abstract
This paper is focused on communication possibilities of visual media regarding to transfer of cultural memory, boundaries of their entirety, ability to testify credibility of this testimony. How has politics of memory transformed? How is nowadays culture of remembering connected to externalised ideas about past? Is it possible to understand remembering as a way of coming to terms with traumatic past? What kind of visual signs does it bring up? These specific statements on the edge of a document and art are related to so-called materialized memory acquiring a concrete (image) form and its communication strategies through which the recipient is a direct witness of events.
The center of the paper will be related mostly to an issue of (un)representation and picturing in terms of handling of traumatic past. Motivation for creating this topic was an interest in the way how a concept of unspeakable and unimaginable is pushed ahead in the museum practice, which has become part of debate on trauma.
In relation to Holocaust, that was called by W. J.
T. Mitchell as "theory's cult of the unrepresentable".
It is a paradox, two contrasting movements: effort to constantly show traumas and at the same time effort to promote what is unrepresentable - suffering, wars, thus areas where we often think that words and images are failing. The visualisation of pain necessarily encounters a problem of aesthetics which in connection with the suffering of the victims, leads us to the question of morality and ethical boundaries.
How are memories of tragic moments in the past transferred? Are they represented concretely or just symbolically in museums? Are there any inappropriate things to display? How powerful are ''images of wickedness"? How much do they influence us? Chosen material does not represent only one medium, it most likely represents samples of verbally-visual testimonies, examples how memory is materialized, constructed and how it communicates in different forms of trauma. Theoretical base will be formed by works of philosophers from the second half of the 20th century, who focused on different types of representation related to memory and trauma displaying (Georges Didi-Huberman, Jacques Rancièr, Susan Sontag and partly Roland Barthes).