Katharina Mayrhofer

The table that doesn't belong to us. An attempt to give back using the Wertheimer family as an example.

Beginn des PhD-Programms / Start of the PhD-Program: WS 2020

Betreuung / Supervision: 
Amalia Barboza

The project is centred on a black table whose history is closely intertwined with the fate of the Wertheimer family, a Jewish family from Braunau am Inn in Upper Austria. The Wertheimers were forced to sell their home for a fraction of its worth in 1939. Some of the Wertheimers’ belongings came into the possession of their pro-Nazi neighbours, the Kaltenhausers, either through direct looting or as the result of pressured emergency sales.

Wertheimer family members became refugees in Britain, South America and Shanghai, while one of the three Wertheimer sisters was later murdered in the Holocaust.

Many decades later Katharina Mayrhofer, a descendant of the Kaltenhauser family, discovered a black table in the attic of her family home. Her search for its original owners led to a collaborative project of restitution and restoration with Helen Emily Davy, a descendant of the Wertheimer family.

Through a multi-year and intergenerational dialogue, historical research was combined with shared family histories and artistic methodologies to explore restitution as a social and interpersonal process. The restoration of the table became an artistic practice within this process of return. As an everyday object and symbolic carrier of loss, dispossession and memory, the table was transformed into a material proxy for its original owners.

The Wertheimers’ table serves as a lens through which to examine questions of memory, responsibility and justice. By bringing together descendants of victims and supporters of the Nazi regime, the project explores how a shared past can be confronted and what ethical responsibilities emerge from it in the present. The project seeks to encourage greater awareness of objects burdened by historical injustice and to foster new, responsible approaches to their acknowledgement, care and restitution.

Kurz-Biographie / Short Bio
Katharina Mayrhofer (b. 1987) is an artist and teaching librarian at the Upper Austrian State Library (Oberösterreichische Landesbibliothek). Katharina Mayrhofer’s practice unfolds at the intersection of sculpture, installation and interdisciplinary inquiry. Her works, often large-scale and site-specific, are marked by a finely tuned sensitivity to space, materiality and transformation. They frequently engage with social, ecological and cultural themes, placing emphasis on participation, collaboration and process.

Katharina Mayrhofer
+43 (0)676 966 41 39
info@katharina-mayrhofer.net
www.katharina-mayrhofer.net