An exhibition of art-enhanced photographs by Dmytro Polyukhovich based on the carvings on the centuries-old matzevot in the Jewish cemetery in Sataniv (which unfortunately has suffered extensive damage in recent years by a self-appointed Haredi man claiming to restore it).
The images for the exhibition focus on specific details of the carved iconography, which combines religious tradition with folk art — floral motifs, animals (and imaginary animals), symbols, religious allegories, and more.
To create the exhibition pieces, Polyukovich manipulated his original photos of the matzevot in Adobe Photoshop, cutting away everything except for the specific detail of the carving that he wanted to highlight and then adding color.
NOTE: The exhibition will be open every Wednesday and every Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. It is also possible to organize group tours every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.
A multimedia exhibition by the artist, architect and historian Natalia Romik dedicated to the creativity of Polish Jews seeking to survive the Shoah in hiding.
In Poland and Ukraine during World War II, approximately 50,000 people survived persecution by the German occupying forces in hiding. The majority of them were Jewish. They found refuge in tree hollows, closets, basements, sewers, empty graves, and other precarious locations. Natalia Romik’s exhibition “Hideouts. The Architecture of Survival” pays tribute to these fragile places of refuge and explores their physicality. The show poses basic questions about the relationship between architecture, private life, and the public sphere: it addresses the protective function of spaces and emphasizes the creativity those in hiding brought to bear in their attempt to survive.
In a research project extending over several years, Natalia Romik and an interdisciplinary team of researchers consulted oral histories to identify several hiding places, which they explored using forensic methods. The multimedia exhibition “Hideouts. The Architecture of Survival” presents the results of this research. It consists of sculptures bearing a direct connection to the sites and includes documentary films, forensic recordings, photos, documents, and objects found in the hiding places.
“Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival” is presented in cooperation with the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin. On the occasion of the show at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, a catalogue will be published in German and English editions by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
The exhibition was curated by Kuba Szreder and Stanisław Ruksza with the help of Aleksandra Janus (scientific collaboration). For the presentation in Frankfurt, Katja Janitschek, curator of the Judengasse Museum, was responsible for the curatorial project management. We would like to thank the Evonik Foundation for their generous support.
The Ukrainian Shtetl: Homecoming to Places of Strength—Photographic Travels by Eugeny Kotlyar
The memory of the traditional world of Jewish small towns in Eastern Europe has been slowly disappearing since the beginning of the last century. “The shtetl,” a small town, is both a real and imagined place in Jewish history and memory. The world of “the shtetl” lasted for more than five centuries. It belonged to many Eastern European countries as the region’s political boundaries shifted from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the Russian Empire and its Pale of Jewish Settlement. This world experienced the hardest shocks of wars, pogroms, evictions of Jews, and socio-political and economic upheavals, and always tried to adapt to the new life. But its life was cut short first by World War I and the October Revolution, and then, ultimately, by the Holocaust.
In this exhibit, Eugeny Kotlyar explores the meaning of the sites formerly thriving with Jewish life. He seeks to capture the feeling of the still-vanishing world of the shtetl through the stylization of photographs in black-and-white and poetic montages that mix history, memory, nostalgia, and a reality now unfolding.
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