Kunsthaus Dresden

Vot Ken You Mach?

02 Dec 2013 - 04 May 2014

Eduard Freidmann: The White Elephant Archive, Videoinstallation, 2013
VOT KEN YOU MACH?
2 December 2013 – 4 May 2014

ART, FILMS, CONCERTS, READINGS, TALKS, COMICS ON JEWISH IDENTITIES IN EUROPE TODAY

Yael Bartana (Amsterdam / Tel Aviv / Berlin), Amit Epstein (Berlin), Karolina Freino (Wroclaw) mit James Muriuki (Nairobi), Eduard Freidmann (Vienna), Rafał Jakubowicz (Poznan), Sharone Lifschitz (London), Nikola Radić Lucati (Tel Aviv / Belgrade), Tamara Moyzes (Prague), Ruth Novaczek (London), Krystyna Piotrowska (Warsaw), Barak Reiser (Frankfurt a. M.), Eran Schaerf (Berlin), Anna Schapiro (Dresden), Tal Sterngast (Berlin), Maya Schweizer (Berlin / Rome), Tehnica Schweiz – Gergely László & Péter Rákosi (Berlin / Budapest), Shira Wachsmann (Berlin), Arye Wachsmuth (Vienna), Claire Waffel (Berlin) Curatorial Team: Christiane Mennicke-Schwarz, Dorota Monkiewicz, Valentina Marcenaro, Rafal Jakubovicz
The Kunsthaus Dresden and its partners in Wrocław, Malmö and Dresden are delighted to open the exhibition and event series Vot ken you mach? dedicated to Jewish identities in present-day Europe. The Jewish-Russian composer Aaron Lebedeff posed this question in New York in the 1920s. In the project named after his song, a large variety of artistic answers are given almost one hundred years later. At the time, the song written in Anglicized Yiddish gave a linguistic form to the observation that identities are in a state of flux between different descents, the past and the future, thus corresponding with our present-day notion of identity as a constellation of potentialities. Vot ken you mach? presents works in diverse media by young contemporary artists in Europe on the history and present of Jewish identity. The artists of the show examine historical constellations of lively experience and identity, constructing conditions that enable treating individuality and history in an open way. What they have in common in the third generation after the Shoah is their concern to depart from established patterns between inhibition, compensation and trauma and by means of formal artistic decisions and the reflection on images. point ways to future forms of identity Vot ken you mach? Concerts, films, talks, performances and further exhibitions offer insights into questions related to art and (Jewish) identity: The thematic focuses include strategies of identity shifts in pop culture, new scenes of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, family secrets and the silence between generations, remembrance as obligation, the unwritten cultural history of Jewish revenge and the search for a ‘normal’ Jewish everyday life.
 

Tags: Yael Bartana, Rafał Jakubowicz, Eran Schaerf, Maya Schweizer