‘Seeing leads to remembering, remembering leads to the doing’

Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 43b

For many years, this rule served as a motto and a source of inspiration at the Jewish Historical Museum. Artist Uri Katzenstein translated it into a language that he invented, whose letters are based on the Latin alphabet, while its ‘characters’ are a figment of his imagination. Katzenstein’s language plays its unique tunes, as the curving lines of its futuristic script generate an undulating movement and an inner rhythm.

This self-made language has no roots and is devoid of evolutionary processes. It has neither historical nor cultural baggage, but it does hold the potential to serve as a means of communication between people: beyond this exhibition, beyond the here and now, in some distant future.

For the museum as well as the artist, gaze, memory, and practice are bound together. These elements are manifested in the current exhibition and simultaneously in the museum’s collection featured in the neighbouring spaces.

#ongoingthings