The Yiddishland Pavilion debuts at the 59th Venice Biennale this month. Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks, curators of the pavilion, edited this series for ArtsEverywhere. The Yiddishland Pavilion is the first independent transnational pavilion bringing together artists and scholars from more than 15 countries who activate Yiddish and diasporic Jewish discourse in contemporary artistic practice.
The work was created from found photographs, mostly from Israel and Poland, and short texts, combined together in a double-sided puzzle. The imagery and text reflect the entangled and conflicted history of Poland and Israel through the story of a 150-year-old apartment building in Lodz. The narrative is also influenced by current matters of housing rights, gentrification and other socio-political issues, along with questions of ownership, power and guilt.
