81 Art & the Public Sphere Volume 6 Numbers 1 & 2 © 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/aps.6.1-2.81_1 SABRINA DETURK Zayed University Memory of absence: Contemporary counter- monuments ABSTRACT In 1992, James Young published an article examining the rise of the counter- monument in Germany. According to Young, the counter-monument provokes its viewers, demands interaction, has the possibility to change over time and insists that memory work be the burden of the viewer, not of the monument itself. While Young focused his attention on a particular set of Holocaust memorials built in Germany in the late 1980s, his formulation can be usefully applied to other contemporary memorials that increasingly incorporate particular design elements that mark them as counter-monuments. This article considers the design of several recent memorials in terms of their aesthetic and physical function as counter- monuments and identifies a new trend in memorial design, the creation of memo- rial museums, which further expands and complicates the role of these memorials. INTRODUCTION James Young coined the term counter-monument in the early 1990s to refer specifically to several German monuments that shared a condition of invis- ibility, either by virtue of their initial placement or their eventual disappear- ance (1992: 270). Young considered the counter-monument a memorialization strategy particularly suited to a country seeking to remember and honour KEYWORDS memorials Holocaust counter-monuments memory museums 9/11