The Biennale of Contemporary Jewish Art – Yiddish Cosmos

About the works:

Himl un Erd (Yiddish Cosmos)
Exhibition by Yevgeniy Fiks

What does space exploration have in common with Yiddish culture?

Multidisciplinary artist Yevgeniy Fiks presents the exhibition Himl un Erd (Yiddish Cosmos / Jidiš vesmír), which reveals surprising connections between the Eastern European Jewish experience, futuristic utopianism, and space exploration. In this exhibition, Fiks creates a speculative narrative of Yiddish culture based on bold imagination, universality, faith, and scientific progress.

Yiddish Cosmos, through the blending of fact and fiction, evokes the atmosphere of 20th-century utopian futurism and the practical achievements of space science from the perspective of Eastern European Jews. Artist Yevgeniy Fiks speculates on the concept of the cosmos and how, in the context of Eastern Europe, it could become the embodiment of a homeland for the Jewish diaspora. If the story of Eastern European Jews in the 20th century is a desire for universalism and scientific progress, then it is the cosmos as “homeland” that most perfectly fulfills these dreams.

In the exhibition, which features textile works, Fiks explores both real and imaginary connections between an invented language of interplanetary communication and Yiddish, while simultaneously contrasting the visual elements of space exploration with Jewish community and Yiddish culture.

This anti-hegemonic and anti-imperialist performative walk begins in front of the synagogue and leads to a nearby park by the train station. The artist will tell stories about Jewish-Ukrainian anarchist women from the first half of the 20th century.

Fanny Kaplan, Olga Taratuta, and Milly Witkop practiced various forms of cross-border resistance against different forms of hegemonic power – whether it was the state, ideology, or socio-cultural systems of oppression.

This “artivist” action will also serve as an introduction and invitation to a joint conversation among participants about how each of us perceives hegemony and imperialism, and a collective attempt to recontextualize these concepts from various viewpoints, experiences, and practices.

“Herstories” (women’s stories) of Jewish-Ukrainian anarchist women can show us how to grasp their legacy today. What they fought and stood against may be the key to better understanding current events and the perspectives of people from the former Pale of Settlement.

Internationalism and nomadism. Energy that transcends territorial boundaries and cultural differences. The embodiment of utopia is a matter of today, not tomorrow.

Monologues of the Usher

Ester, born into an Orthodox Jewish family, left religion and fell in love with an usher at the Lisbon cinema, which operated in the basement of a lepers’ home in Lisbon, Portugal from 1963 to 1973 (during Salazar’s dictatorship, it served as an underground resistance center for freedom fighters – right under the regime’s nose). Through her love for the usher, Ester also fell in love with the cinema itself, which led to her expulsion from home.

Elephants in the Night Metula

Elephants in the Night Metula is a performance that combines video, digital slides, film, animation, and two voices – in Yiddish and English. It is based on texts by Yiddish poet Avraham Sutzkever and places his poetry into the context of Israeli literary history from today’s perspective.

The performance addresses the harsh Israeli cultural policies of the 1950s that suppressed the cultures of the Jewish diaspora in favor of the hegemonization of a new Hebrew culture.

Elephants in the Night Metula builds on Sala-Manca’s previous performances dedicated to texts and poetry. The work continues their exploration of the tension between the written word (text), spoken expression, the body, and image, as well as between visual, cultural, and sound translations in electronic space.

About the artists

YEVGENIY FIKS is an artist, theorist, and curator born in Moscow and based in New York since 1994. His work explores the post-Soviet dialogue between East and West and the history of leftist political movements. Among his best-known projects is Communist Guide to New York City (2008), which maps sites connected to the American communist movement. Fiks has developed a unique concept of Yiddish as a “cosmic” language—linking heaven and earth, everyday life and utopian imagination, Jewish and global culture. His exhibition Yiddish Cosmos was first presented in New York in 2018 and later in Moscow. In 2022, Fiks co-curated the Yiddishland Pavilion at the prestigious Venice Biennale alongside Maria Veits. 

ZUZANNA HERTZBERG is an interdisciplinary artist, artivist, and researcher. Her practice includes painting, textile art, and artivist actions in public space. She creates installations and collages based on archival material, often accompanied by spoken-word performances. Her work weaves together individual and collective memory and addresses issues of marginalization and the erasure of inconvenient—particularly female—narratives from historical memory. 

SALA-MANCA is an art collective founded in 2000, creating performances, videos, installations, and new media projects exhibited in renowned art institutions around the world. Their work focuses on the poetics of translation—cultural, media, and social—as well as textual, urban, and internet contexts. They also explore tensions between low-tech and high-tech aesthetics and tackle social and political themes. The group consists of Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman, born in Buenos Aires and currently based in Canada. 

Curatorship: 

MgA. Tamara Moyzes, PhD is a curator and artist whose practice is rooted in political art and the critical exploration of structurally marginalized identities and lived experiences. She completed her doctoral studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where in 2018 she founded the interdisciplinary gallery Artivist Lab, functioning as an experimental laboratory for artistic research. She is the co-founder of the art collective Romane Kale Panthera (2014) and the initiator of the Artist in Need residency program (2022), created for artists fleeing war. In 2024, she also founded the program Avindo/The Future, aimed at supporting Roma artists, theorists, and curators. In her work, she has long addressed topics such as racism, nationalism, orientalism, and intersectionality. She critically reflects on social and political phenomena through artistic activism. 

MgA. Shlomi Yaffe is an intermedia artist originally from Israel, currently living and working in Prague. His work frequently addresses social and political topics, challenging especially pseudo-scientific ideas about race and the body rooted in myths, ideologies, or cultural assumptions. Since 2020, he has also been working on a long-term project titled Laktismus, which presents a utopian eco-feminist concept envisioning a world without geographical divisions. 

Artwork featured in the Biennale visual:
Yevgeniy Fiks, Himl un Erd (Yiddish Cosmos) – Boris Volynov, 2016