We asked our reviewers and other commentators on the cultural scene to give us a highlight for them among works created in the last decade which reflect Jewish experience
gAlit MAnA, art curator I was overwhelmed by the mass and scale of Anselm Kiefer’s installation Occupations (part of his Next Year in Jerusalem exhibition shown at the Gagosian Gallery, New York in 2010); disturbed emotionally but moved intellectually. Viewed through the open doors of a large steel container are a mass of photographs, taken in 1969 and reprinted, in which Kiefer performs the Hitler salute. He is facing significant European historical sites, signifying the importance of European heritage and the destructive force of Hitler’s occupying armies. Kiefer’s highly provocative gesture critiques and eternalises the notorious salute, its place in the erasure of European Jewish life and racism’s persistent threat. Other parts of the monumental exhibition use painting and sculpture and draw on cultural myths and metaphors from the Old and New Testaments to the kabbalah, from ancient Roman history to the poetry of Paul Célan. Kiefer was born in Germany in 1945. [Anselm Kiefer: Next Year in Jerusalem with an essay by MarinaWarner is published this month by Prestel.]
art
rAchel Dickson, head of curatorial services, Ben uri My choice is Homesh Evacuation # 01 (Taken Down), 2005, by Natan Dvir, in the collection of Ben Uri Gallery, London JewishMuseum ofArt. I am drawn to this as a starkly beautiful contemporary image which, in dealing with a recent highly charged political situation, becomes, through the power of its composition and its focus on the human aspect, something universal and timeless. This fleeting moment, taken during the 2005 eviction of right-wing Jewish settlers from theWest Bank settlement of Homesh, with its powerful vertical cascade of bodies, calls to mind the iconography of the Christian
deposition.An Israeli photographer, now based in NewYork, winner of the International Ben Uri JewishArtist of the YearAward in 2007, Dvir continues to imbue his reportage with a power to hold and engage the viewer long after the instant has passed.
JeWish renAissAnce octoBer 2011
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