Experimental History | Research x Creative Response
The Mengele Twins Booklet (2020)
(click on images to read)
A graphic booklet on ‘the Mengele twins’ of the Holocaust. Josef Mengele was a notorious Nazi doctor who carried out experiments on Jewish twin children under the guise of medical advancement and racial cleansing. While doing research for this project, I was deeply moved by the story of Eva Mozes Kor, one of the most documented inmates of Auschwitz, who ‘survived Mengele’ and famously forgave her tormenters. It was her strength of spirit, eloquence and incredible ideals that motivated me to complete this booklet.
Another key objective of mine was to highlight the institutional forces that allowed Josef Mengele to manifest his sadistic side and commit heinous crimes against humanity without fear of repercussion. The Nazi regime relied on bio-racial propaganda, Social Darwinist ideology and the pseudoscience of eugenics to justify genocide, enabling professional physicians to participate in medicalised mass murder.
The goal of twin experiments, in particular, was to prove the superiority of, as well as help cultivate the Aryan race. I wanted to represent the atmosphere of Mengele’s lab and the psychological pains Jewish children had to endure, in order to highlight the injustice of their mistreatment.
***Graphic elements and captions were adopted from the accounts and testimony of inmates and survivors. I refrained from using images of real victims, employing instead, movie stills, vintage pictures and silhouettes, blurring out almost every human faces to ensure my graphics are visually confronting, but do not incite negative emotions. High-res PDF
