122,499 Files
A commissioned permanent installation for Yad Vashem’s new Archives Visitor Center
Duration: 44:44 minutes. Video, sound, scans, stills, 2024
122,499 Files engages the core of Holocaust memory through an immense digital mosaic presented on an eight-meter screen in the entrance hall of Yad Vashem’s new Archives Visitor Center. The installation is composed of 122,499 individual digital files—the exact number of scanned items used—drawn from Yad Vashem’s archival collections. These include documents, photographs, films, artworks, and personal objects, many of them rare and not ordinarily accessible to the public.
The work unfolds as a continuous, dynamic flow, interweaving materials from the Holocaust period with those from the years that preceded it. In doing so, it resists linear narration and instead constructs a temporal field in which past and present coexist—inviting reflection, immersion, and sustained attention. Each file functions as a form of testimony: a material trace bearing the imprint of individual lives—lives cut short, disrupted, or irrevocably transformed—and of a world that once existed and was systematically destroyed.
Through its vast accumulation of fragments and details, 122,499 Files forms a living human tapestry that gestures toward the richness, diversity, and complexity of Jewish life before and during the Holocaust. The installation does not seek to summarize or explain, but to hold space—for contemplation, for proximity, and for renewed engagement with memory itself. Here, archival materials become more than historical evidence; they emerge as layered physical and digital remnants of lived experience, creativity, endurance, and loss.
Curator: Miri Shavid
An excerpt:
Part, installation view:
View from the sculpture garden:
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