Digital Diasporas: Sala-Manca & The Museum of the Contemporary

As social distancing transforms what it means to interact with art, the Museum of Jewish Montreal is thrilled to announce its new Digital Diasporas Series, an exciting new platform connecting our local community with the practices and new ideas of contemporary artists from across the globe.

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.

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Join the Sala-Manca Group‘s Lea Mauas (General & Artistic director of Mamuta Art & Research Centre) and Diego Rotman (Head of the Department of Theater Studies at the Hebrew University) for a discussion and presentation on the critical thought and approach behind their practice before, during, and after COVID-19. Their discussion will concentrate on some past key projects done through the Museum of the Contemporary, among them the online event “Comment 13: Something is Rotten in The State of Denmark” that took place April 4, 2020, in the early days of COVID-19 restrictions.

The Sala-Manca group will share their tactics, way of working and their experiences as founders, directors, guides, guards and custodians of the Museum of the Contemporary.

Register here through Eventbrite!

This event is free and will be held via Zoom. You will receive further information on how to connect through Zoom upon registration.

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The Museum of the Contemporary was founded in December 2009 at the Mamuta Art and Research Center in the Ein Karem area of Jerusalem, Israel – a physical and digital institution/framework that appears and disappears, only to reappear elsewhere. The Museum of the Contemporary’s first physical home was at the Ethnographic Department of the Museum of the Contemporary, opened on December 31, 2014 in the basement space of the Hansen House, the former leprosarium in Jerusalem. The Ethnographic Department inhabits the seam between art museum and ethnographic museum, and between visual art and popular art, exploring the tensions between the original, the recreation, the copy, and the processed.

The Sala-Manca Group is an independent group of artists that has been active in Jerusalem since 2000, pursuing creative work in a wide range of fields, including performance, video, poetry, and public art. Sala-Manca’s works deal with poetics of translation (cultural, mediatic, and social), with textual, urban and net contexts, and with the tensions between low tech and high tech aesthetics, as well as social and political issues. The group consists of two artists, Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman. It works in collaboration with many artists, curators, and cultural institutions in Israel and abroad. Over the years, over 500 artists, curators, filmmakers, poets, architects, and artists from other fields have taken part in its various projects. Sala-Manca published Hearat Shulaym – (Note in the Margin): Independent Quarterly for Contemporary Art and Literature (2001-2007), and curates and produces Heara events – multidisciplinary and collaborative events independently organized with no commercial or official sponsors. In 2009 they founded the Mamuta Art and Media Center.