Transitions: Festival of Contemporary Jewish Arts
Organized by Dagesh
Berlin, DE
August 18-20, 2021

“Transitions" seeks to create a new Jewish visibility that transcends borders in a European and transatlantic exchange. Via video and sound art, text composition, and other forms of visual and digital arts, over 15 artists will showcase their experience and understanding of solidarity and resistance through aesthetics and artistic practice from a shared and yet diverse contemporary Jewish perspective.

The concept of “Transitions” describes a liminal space, a threshold condition in which society currently finds itself, both socially and politically. A “betwixt and between” state, where the usual order of things is disrupted and new potentials and limits can be challenged and explored. With “Transitions” we seek to aesthetically explore ways to create newness founded on the very loss and (transgenerational) trauma of the original places. Speaking from a multiplicity of situated Jewish positions, the art pieces in the exhibition will display the artists’ engagement with political events, discourses and movements that impact and mobilise them in their specific context.

Liliana Farber, Eduard Freudmann, Yara Haskiel, Nikolay Karabinovych, Krivoy Kolektiv (Sophia Sobko, Irina Zadov, Aravah Berman-Mirkin), Nicolás Melmann, Carlos Metta and Aaron Samuels, Tamara Micner, Katja Pilipenko, Nina Prader, Nikola Radić Lucati, Elianna Renner and Oree Holban, Hadas Tapouchi, Daniel Terna.

Curators of the festival are Sasha M. Salzmann, Tobias Herzberg und Jo Frank (Literature), Layla Zami und Oxana Chi (Performance+Music), Daniel Laufer (Exhibition) and Julia Y. Alfandari (Discussion and Workshops).

Introduction by Daniel Laufer:

“Transitions” brings together fourteen art works by international artists, whose work grapples with intersections and dichotomies across world history and art history, politics and day-to-day Jewish culture. In their techniques and use of media, the artworks adopt photographic, audiovisual, and cinematographic frames of reference. From a variety of perspectives, contexts and forms, the “Wehrhaftigkeit” (resistance) in their artistic expressions is ingrained in all pieces. The works fall broadly into two thematic focus areas: first, transitions between (temporal) spaces, which are in a process of constant reevaluation and transformation, and second, transitions between language (sound) and words and images.

The artwork timeprotocol.net by Liliana Farber opens the exhibition space and modifies it. Temporal synchronization is the bedrock of electronic communication. The web application ‘Network Time Protocol’ is an artwork that displays the local time according to Halakha, Jewish religious law, rather than the UTC standard. The halakhic hour or relative hour (shaʿah zǝmanit,שעה זמנית) is the method by which time is calculated and the system for its perception under Jewish law. The piece offers a way to connect with other people via a culturally rooted method of time measurement.

Not only is time an abstract concept that structures our thinking, but as a kind of architecture, it also subdivides the concrete spaces we move through, spaces that we often only notice in passing. Across the exhibition, these same spaces are precisely investigated and radically reassessed: monuments are turned into cautionary memorials (Eduard Freudmann, Vigil of Disgrace); seemingly neutral public spaces suddenly mark the sites of Second World War atrocities (Hadas Tapouchi, Memory Practice); obscured locations from the Jewish community become visible again (Nikola Radić Lucati, Ethnographer’s Argument) and public spaces are transformed when a bush becomes a protagonist and conversation partner (Elianna Renner and Oree Holban, The Talking Bush). This element of dialogue carries over to the video art of Yara Haskiel (Precarious Twilight Zones) and Nikolay Karabinovych (Even further) as memories interact with their temporal, material and affective continuities and discontinuities.

The works by Daniel Terna (Fred) and the Krivoy Kolektiv (Chai Mikveh, The Four Mitzvot of the Queer, Soviet Jewish Diaspora) centre on the body itself, which moves through and is simultaneously structured by space and time. The human body consists of layers, membranes, substances, skin and surfaces. Bodies are organic, but they also bear deposits of history, traditions, images and words. The contribution by the Krivoy Kolektiv takes the Jewish ritual bath—a rite of passage through which a bather emerges from the water spiritually purified–and subjects it to a transformation of its own: a personal and individual experience becomes communal and collective.

In its second thematic focus, the exhibition explores transformation processes that are distilled into language, sound and words and are simultaneously shaped by and accompanied by them. Forty pairs of words – euphemisms and their literal meanings – constitute a visual poem (Katja Pilipenko, Synonyms). A sound map and narrative music composition capture an audible universe that describes a living environment, a culture, a comprehensive sound-identity (Nicolás Melmann, Spread). An intergenerational dialogue with the music of Simon & Garfunkel culminates in an imaginary response to the musicians (Tamara Michner, Old Friends). And finally, an audio artwork probes the relationship between Yom Kippur and the Black Lives Matter movement (Carlos Metta and Aaron Samuels, Forgiveness).

The space of ““Transitions” is anything but static; it is a liminal space, a transition between two other locations, or states of being in constant flux where anything feels possible. These artistic perspectives open our eyes to the meanings of interstitial space while interrogating its obverse – fully conscious that in every transitory movement, something is lost and something else emerges anew.

Dagesh’s “Transitions: Festival of Contemporary Jewish Arts” is in cooperation with the Leo Baeck Foundation and Asylum Arts.