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Digital Diasporas with FestivALT
Thu September 24, 2020 @ 17:00 - 18:15
Digital Diasporas with FestivALT
Thursday September 24 at 5:00PM EDT
We are excited to be hosting the artists, thinkers, and creators behind a new art-activism project from Kraków-based Jewish arts collective FestivALT for the September edition of our Digital Diasporas series!
Join FestivALT co-director Magda Rubenfeld-Koralewska, cultural anthropologist and curator Erica Lehrer and artist Jaqueline Nicholls to discover their approach to a new critical intervention around Jewish subject matter in the Krakow Ethnographic Museum, and the ways it has changed and evolved as a result of the global pandemic.
This event is free and will be held on Zoom. Click here to register via Eventbright.
About the Project: Despite its location in a former Jewish school in the heart of the Jewish quarter in Kraków, Poland, and covering one of the richest periods of multicultural history in Galicia, the permanent exhibit of the city’s historic Ethnographic Museum (MEK) barely addresses Jewish or other minority cultures. In July 2019 FestivALT initiated a public conversation with the Museum’s Director regarding the museum’s ethnic depictions and silences. MEK had no prior contact with Kraków’s Jewish community, and the results of that conversation were surprising for all, catalyzing a process of collaboration with the Jewish community and self-critique for the museum, to consider how it might better exhibit Jewish and minority cultures going forward.
In 2020 FestivALT is collaborating with Professor Erica Lehrer (a Montreal-based cultural anthropologist with longstanding connections to Poland and MEK) and partnering with four artists working in mixed media (Jacqueline Nicholls, Dorota Mytych, Wiktor Podgórski and Edward Pasewicz) to design a large-scale multi-media installation responding to the museum’s problematic content. Due to COVID-19, the works will be projected on the museum, raising questions and offering curatorial dreams for after lockdown.
Join us to discuss this unfolding activist provocation!
About the speakers
Erica Lehrer – cultural anthropologist and curator, teaches at Concordia University, Founding Director of the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab (CaPSL) http://capsl.cerev.ca/director/
Jaqueline Nicholls – visual artist, educator and cultural events producer. Her art engages traditional Jewish ideas in untraditional ways. http://www.jacquelinenicholls.com/
Magda Rubenfeld Koralewska – graphic designer, social entrepreneur, activist, co-founder and co-artistic director of FestivALT. http://festivalt.com
About Digital Diasporas
Much as a diaspora describes the dispersal of a people across space, this series explores the new movements artists are taking away from their practice in the digital world or how they are working in ways that forge new communities and connections despite geographic distance. In short, it’s a series about being apart, together. Join us each month as selected artists take us through their practice prior to the pandemic, their innovations in response to social distancing, and their visions for the future.