Support Jonas and The "I Often Forget" Fund #weremember

THE “I OFTEN FORGET” FUND

Dear Friends,

For the past five years, I’ve researched, conceived, produced, and exhibited “I Often Forget,” my fine art project that memorializes victims of the Vilna Ghetto during the Holocaust in Vilnius, Lithuania. I Often Forget is the outcome of my Fulbright journey that has been exhibited at California State University, Los Angeles, and the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania. After investing thousands of dollars and countless hours, as much as I’d like to, I’m unable to continue self-funding this vital work.

The I Often Forget Fund goal is to package the project into a multi-year traveling exhibition with a quality book to match. Please read the information below-any and all types of contributions are deeply appreciated.

In gratitude,

Jonas Kulikauskas

This GoFundMe supports:

1. An artist confronting themes of historical omission, cultural desecration, while offering Holocaust education for a new generation during a time of rising global anti-Semitism.

2. The production of a multi-lingual quality fine art book that preserves the words and memories of Vilna Ghetto prisoners and disseminated to libraries worldwide.

3. A multi-year plan that enables I Often Forget to be packaged, travel, installed, and exhibited throughout Lithuania at libraries, synagogues, museums, and institutions of higher learning in partnership with the Vilnius Public Jewish Library, Liana Jagniatinsky, Director.

4. Developing a proposal and marketing infrastructure required to present I Often Forget to institutions worldwide.

5. An innovative way of looking at photographs through a unique, tactile, intimate experience that provides a personal space for reconciliation, reflection, and healing.

PROJECT STATEMENT

I Often Forget

In January 2021, I arrived in Vilnius on a Fulbright scholarship to study the remaining Litvak (Lithuanian Jews) community. Fastening a World War II-era lens to a newly constructed 8x10” camera, I set out with black and white film to explore the streets of what used to be the Vilna Ghetto. Informed by historical diaries and testimonies, I walked the same cobblestone streets and passageways where more than 40,000 Jews were trapped before being systematically killed between 1941 and 1943.

The ghetto included the Great Synagogue of Vilna, the most significant monument of Litvak Jewry, built nearly 400 years ago. I documented the archeological excavation of this temple that Nazis bombed and severely damaged, and later desecrated by the Soviets. I also photographed the massacre pits at Panerai, where a majority of those held in the Vilna Ghetto were murdered.

The outcome of this fieldwork is the photo installations and exhibition I Often Forget. Curated by Mika Cho, this project was exhibited by the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery at the California State University, Los Angeles, in 2023. I Often Forget was translated into Lithuanian, reconfigured, and exhibited at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2025. In 2024, I Often Forget was also featured in the group exhibition, The Power of Resilience and Hope – Photography and the Holocaust: Then & Now, at CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, New York, curated by Robert Hirsch.

ESTIMATED COSTS

$14.5K I Often Forget Traveling Exhibition Production

• ($1.25K) Exhibition graphics

• ($0.75K) Exhibition tables, sawhorses, pedestals

• ($0.5K) Packaging and crating

• ($3K) Marketing, website, and educational ephemera

• ($9K) Storage (3-year)

$25K Publication of a quality fine art book (includes editing, translation, design, production, disseminating, and printing in Lithuania)

The book will:

• Preserve the memories and writings of survivors and those who perished in the Holocaust

• Extend the life of the project beyond the exhibition

• Engage viewers who cannot experience the exhibition

• Be disseminated to libraries worldwide

• Emulate the hand-held tactile experience offered in the exhibition

• Present an original concept for a photo book

• Honor Yiddish, Lithuanian, Polish, and English languages

SUPPORTERS

I Often Forget includes contributions by Saulius Sužiedelis, Professor of History, Emeritus, Jon Seligman, Israel Antiquities Authority, Jerusalem, Israel, Dovid Katz, Cantor Rita Glassman and Tomas Venclova.

I Often Forget is supported and has been funded in part by:

• Fulbright Foundation

• Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles, Mika Cho, Director

• Puffin Foundation

• Contemporary Arts Foundation

• Jewish Community, “Vilnius–Lithuanian Jerusalem”

• Vilnius Jewish Public Library (A branch of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania)

• Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History

• Užupis Art Incubator

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

The photographs of Jonas Kulikauskas make an important contribution by depicting the empty world of the ghetto in the colour of unimaginable tragedy. It is a noble tribute to our citizens murdered by totalitarianism.

–Tomas Venclova

I Often Forget repurposes file folders, the literal tools of the Nazi officials who facilitated murder not by pulling triggers, but by doing their jobs as so-called Schreibtischtäter (desk murderers), the human cogs in a criminal machine. In Kulikauskas’s work, office supplies not only protest historical amnesia of the Nazi past. They also offer a cautionary tale about the dangers of the administrative state.

–Daniel H. Magilow, Author, Holocaust Representations in History

By pairing their ordinary lives with the extraordinary witness accounts of decades ago, Kulikauskas closes the loop of past and present in a way that makes it clear, as Faulkner might say, the past is not dead, it’s not even the past. Will I Often Forget help us to remember? Will we remember in time to stop the world from ending again, today, like it has so many times before? If we’re to have a chance, we must first learn the history.

–Shana Nys Dambrot, Art Critic, Los Angeles

The passion of the artist’s commitment to his project can be felt in the bones of viewers… He has preserved a grim, utterly horrible time and elevated the sacrifices, struggles, and meaning behind so many precious, lost lives.

– Genie Davis (Diversions LA)

Though I Often Forget is quite tranquil visually, the testimonials and histories that it unearths are difficult to stomach. Despite this, it’s an important way of pairing modern life with the disturbing reality of the past. Kulikauskas’s lack of Holocaust education mirrors a threat that is still present in America…

– Renée Reizman (Hyperallergic)

I think it is very important to leave this story and message, no matter how terrible it may be, for future generations. Especially for the younger generation, for whom linear storytelling is no longer suitable, for whom, as we imagine and always say, interactive storytelling is needed. Probably few of you would think that analog printed photography can be interactive.

– Jonas Staselis, Photographer, Former Chair of the Lithuanian Photographers Association

LINKS

Lithuanian Public Television Menora

Program starts at 2:24

Jonas Kulikauskas Reimagines the Ghetto

Renée Reizman, Hyperallergic

Unforgettable

Jonas Kulikauskas at Ronald H Silverman Fine Arts Gallery

Genie Davis, Diversions LA

I Often Forget, Ronal H. Silverman Fine Arts Galle

JONAS KULIKAUSKAS

Jonas Kulikauskas is an interdisciplinary artist inspired by his American-Lithuanian heritage, fatherhood, and faith. His research-based practice offers critical examinations of communities, traditions, and institutions. Themes of historical omission, identity, and kindness are prevalent in his work.

Photo of Jonas Kulikauskas and opening reception by Vygaudas Juozaitis, Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania