Andrea Palašti is a visual artist, independent curator and lecturer, based in Novi Sad, Serbia. Andrea holds a master’s degree in Photography at the Academy of Art, University of Novi Sad. In 2015, she graduated with PhD in Art and media theory from the University of Arts in Belgrade. She is active in the field of research and exhibition practice that experiments with archives, methodologies and contextual aspects of art, which emphasizes issues of cultural geography and the everyday life. She has recently been appointed as a Lecturer in Visual communications of the Department for New media at the Academy of Art in Novi Sad.

Currently, Andrea is working as a researcher and curator of the exhibition Portraits and memories, which is an ongoing and still expanding exhibition and education program started by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Serbia (FJCS). The exhibition explores and shows one part of the newly established digital archive of pre-Holocaust era photographs and recording testimonies of Holocaust survivors of the Jewish Community in Serbia. The digital archive currently holds a collection of more than 6000 digitalized private and family photographs and around 280 recorded testimonies in an audio-video and textual format. Furthermore the exhibition also explores private photographs which were taken during the Holocaust by the families who went into hiding in their home country or as tourists abroad. These photographs, often made as snapshots or holiday photos – landscape or cityscape shots, increases the contrast when we know the context of the image.

During her EHRI fellowship at the USHMM in Washington, the Wiener Library in London and at the Bildarchiv in Koblenz, she will conduct an archive research in order to identify and where possible arrange for digital copies of photographs and relevant testimonies portraying the (pre-) Holocaust Jewish Community of Serbia and the wider territory of ex-Yugoslavia. The collected images and documents/information would be of an integral part of the archive and the exhibition Portraits and memories, which will be maintained by the Museum of Jewish History in Belgrade (a body of the FJCS) as a permanent resource for promoting understanding and tolerance through Holocaust Remembrance and learning.