,This exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of Artis, Assylum Art, (Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (MFJC) and the Pais council for Arts and Culture.
In this exhibition Tamar Latzman traces the travels of S. An-sky (author of The Dybbuk) in search of an increasingly changing Jewish culture. An-sky (1863-1920) is the pseudonym of author, poet, and playwright Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport.
Between 1912 and 1914 An-sky headed an ethnographic expedition that sought to record and preserve the world of rural Jewish culture within the borders of the Russian Empire. In his perception this world was gradually vanishing in face of the very modernity that he himself represented. The expedition collected certificates and documents, nigunim, folk songs and tales, and also photographed and recorded the communities it visited. The collected materials were shown in an exhibition in Saint Petersburg immediately after the expedition, and one of the stories An-sky heard during his travels served as the source for The Dybbuk.
Latzman returns to An-sky’s journey and examines the inquiring, cataloguing gaze that traces the sources of his own Jewish identity. Thus, a chain of gazes is formed between Latzman, An-sky, and the Jewish communities. An-sky creates a scientific view that at the same time maintains a cultural-political agenda about Jewish identity. Latzman’s view examines the impossibility of separating these two forms in the researcher’s position. Instead, the returning gaze of the initial research subject emerges, revealing that the spiritual and mystical are not only given to a scientific gaze, but are also contained within the research itself.
The exhibition presents video works in which Latzman returns to An-sky’s collection and travels. Displayed alongside them is a collection of objects and photographs collected by the artist throughout her research story, a process that simulates An-sky’s ethnographic logic a hundred years ago. The present assemblage was created as a repetitive and intuitive activity concerning the question of the act of collection in general and the semi-scientific passion to capture the research subject wholly and comprehensively. A special place in the exhibition is devoted to a series of images that were created during a multiple-stage process of reproduction that include dismantling, assembling, replicating, and shifting between mediums. The series engages with the appearance of mystical aspects in the culture and research subjects, and examines the unconscious and haunted dimensions in An-sky’s journey as opposed to his own identity and the culture he sought to summarize and conclude.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
