13/12/2010

Cinthia Marcelle, a Brazilian artist who makes films, photographs and installations, is the winner of the first Future Generation Art Prize receiving £100 000 in prize money. The Future Generation Art Prize - established by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kiev, Ukraine - is a biannual prize which aims to discover and provide long-term support for a generation of emerging artists. Harriet talks to one of the jurors, Eckhard Schneider.

Photo: Riga skyline.

Before the Second World War, Latvia was home to almost 100,000 Jews and 210 synagogues. Today only around 9,000 Jewish people still live in Latvia, and there are only two synagogues left in the entire country. 70,000 Latvian Jews were killed when the Nazis invaded in 1941. But Latvia has never had a museum showing the history of the Holocaust. Until now that is. The first section of a new museum has recently opened in Riga, with the site right next to the former ghetto, where the country's Jewish population was forced to live before being wiped out. The BBC's Damien McGuinness met up with the Museum's Director Rabbi Menachem Barkahan to find out that the aim and purpose of the venture is not only to memorialize the dead but to comfort, and challenge, the living.