A mountain to combat hatred

From a distance, Witness by artist Mina Kupfermann looks like a huge mountain. But get up close and you see hundreds of images and words collaged onto the canvas — examples of antisemitism.

At nearly three meters tall, Witness is “too big to ignore” she says. In a short film on YouTube she explains that her father, the artist Jacques Kupfermann, was a refugee from Austria to the USA in 1940, a witness to the horrors of Nazism in Europe.

Watching the growth of antisemitic and anti-Zionist discourse in British politics in recent years, “I felt uncomfortable talking about it,” she says. “I kept quiet.” But as the years passed, “I could no longer keep silent”, especially with the rise of Corbyn and the Far Left. “We were mocked, abused and treated like dancing bears.”

Witness was her response, telling “my story, my father’s story, and that of his family before him” and challenging the viewer to “call out this hatred, even when it is a lonely path”.