We are happy to present the results of the ShUM Cities artist in residency carried out this past summer by the Hungarian visual artist Bence Illyes.
The ShUM Cities project linking the important medieval Jewish heritage of the German cities of Worms, Speyer, and Mainz, was included in 2021 on UNESCO’s roster of World Heritage.
The international artist-in-residence program, supported by the state and the three cities, was launched in 2021. As we posted in August, this year’s program was the second edition, after a break. Open to all artistic fields, the competition offered three grants for the realization of an artistic project dealing with the history of the ShUM communities and their religious, cultural and architectural heritage. Projects needed to present an artistic approach to the ShUM heritage, “taking into account the history and present of Judaism and its views.”
In addition to Bence Illyes, the other two artists in residence this year were the musician Yotam Schlezinger from Israel, and the video artist Janet Grau from the USA.
Carrying out his residency in Speyer, where there is a historic monumental mikveh, Bence worked on a two-part project that focused on Jewish symbols and on water.
One was a series of three cyanotype prints, that each depicted an image from one of the ShUM cities and also the waters of the Rhine river.
The other was a “Zine” publication created from a series of linocut prints of Jewish symbols and accompanying text based on research about them. His collaborator, the graphic designer Judit Borsi, joined him in Speyer for two weeks to produce the Zine — an outgrowth of a Zine project based on the carved decoration of abandoned Jewish cemeteries in Hungary, which we posted about last year.
“The [two] parts are connected in a way, that the cyanotype series wants to summarize briefly the SchUM heritage entirely, incorporating into the work medieval kabbalah, religious heritage, geography, and the river Rhine of course, while the print series with the symbols is more about details and wants to present a culture through the symbols that it uses,” Bence told JHE in an email.
“We collected symbols from the SchUM sites, from cemeteries, synagogues, books and even from a mikveh. Then we created lino cut print of the symbol, which we later placed in the magazine,” he said in a presentation about the project. “We did extensive research on each symbol, their meaning and gathered all relevant informations that were eventually formed the informative and educational texts of the zine.”
Here’s an interview with Bence Illyes about the project. It was conducted in English, but there is a German voiceover…..
See a PDF presentation of the Symbols of ShUM Zine
See a PDF presentation of the Water and SchUM Cyanotype Series