Author: Olivier Hottois

The last exhibition of the Jewish Museum of Belgium before closing for construction works in late 2024, Passage reflects on the idea of transformation. It explores how the spiritual blends with the profane life, how the rite combines with the ordinary, and what happens when the collective and the intimate tie together.

The exhibition consists of three complementary paths. The first immerses us in the universe of Charlemagne Palestine. In an installation entitled «AA BATT BEARR BARR MITZVAHH INN MESHUGAHLANDDD», the artist reinterprets the transition to adulthood in the Jewish tradition. In the tradition of schmattès, the Yiddish word for rags or second-hand clothes, he reinvents the gestures of collecting, sewing, and mending the fabric that mark the history of the Jewish worlds.

Echoing the fabric assemblages of Charlemagne Palestine, the second route proposes a dialogue around textiles, by crossing the collections of the Jewish Museum of Belgium, those of the Center of Judeo-Moroccan Culture, and the interventions of four contemporary artists: Jennifer Bornstein, Richard Moszkowicz, Elise Peroi, Arlette Vermeiren. This game of free-spirited associations reminds us that textile work is, in itself, a ritual practice and that women occupy a central place in it. It also shows that fabrics are never a mere adornment: alternately, they are places of memory, symbols of celebration, or accessions to the sacred.

Through a performances program, the third path questions the contemporary resurgence of beliefs and rites. Hilal Aydoğdu, David Bernstein, Barbara Salomé Felgenhauer, and Zinaïda Tchelidze rethink the museum space to create an intimate and sensory laboratory, conducive to reflection and exchange.

A symbolic gesture, Passage is not only the end point of an exhibition program that has been running in this building for over twenty years. This exhibition questions the future Jewish Museum, which will also imagine new forms of passages.

circumcision cloths, Arlon, 1843, 1888, 1875, Antwerp, 1802

On the occasion of INTERNATIONAL ROMA DAY, the Jewish Museum of Belgium is pleased to invite you to an event dedicated to celebrating Roma culture and raising awareness of anti-Roma discrimination.
In partnership with ESMA, Carrefour des Cultures:

ESMA-CC is an association that promotes and supports artists, cultural creations and music from the Balkans and Roma, with the aim of encouraging encounters, debate and dialogue between groups, communities and cultural players in civil society.

Program

3:30 pm: Conference: Carol Silverman (Eng – Fr)
4:45 pm: Q&A
5:00 pm: Break
5:30 p.m.: Concerts
6:30 pm: Drink of friendship
Price
Price: 7 euros on site
Free for students

Free event

Conference

Historical and cultural contexts of klezmer and Balkan Romani music: comparisons and contrasts
Jews and Roma are often considered Europe’s two most emblematic minority groups. Both communities have greatly enriched the culture and arts of Eastern Europe, while facing historical discrimination, including the Nazi genocide. This illustrated lecture explores the cultural links and differences between Jews and Roma in Eastern Europe. Focusing on music, we will examine the professional role of klezmer and Roma musicians, as well as the context of their repertoire and performances in ritual and family life. Today, Balkan Romani music is not only a dynamic community asset, but also a global musical product; klezmer is also being creatively revitalized and recast. At the same time, anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsyism are on the rise. In these difficult times, music can serve as a tool in the fight against neo-nationalism and xenophobia.

Carol Silverman

Carol Silverman has been interested in Balkan music and culture for over forty years as a researcher, teacher, artist and activist. Professor Emerita of Cultural Anthropology and Folklore at the University of Oregon, she has taught Jewish and Balkan folklore, focusing on music, festivals, cultural policy and human rights issue

Concerts

ESMA Next Generation Band
Vilmos Csikos, Anette Dukane Csikos, Duka Vilmos
The Klezmer Society

Exhibition

Ceija Stojka

Ceija Stojka was born in Austria in 1933, the fifth of six children in a family of Roma horse traders. Deported at the age of ten with her mother Sidonie and other family members, she survived three concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. 

It was only forty-five years later, in 1988, at the age of fifty-five, that she felt the need and the necessity to talk about it; she embarked on a fantastic work of remembrance and, despite being considered illiterate, wrote several poignant books, in a poetic and highly personal style, which made her the first Roma woman survivor of the death camps to bear witness to her concentration camp experience, against oblivion and denial, against the prevailing racism. 

SKINFOLD is a durational performance in which bodies move alongside each other in reciprocal recognition, leaning towards and exploring internalised landscapes in an attempt of soft transformations.

Tending to an embodied habitat, where boundaries of flesh and body image continuously blur, the performers allow themselves to shift their representational features and ways of bodily perceptions. What does it mean to inhabit a body? This body?

These strategies for a utopian and transformative practice stem from an ongoing choreographic research initiated by Abigail Aleksander and Mary Szydlowska. Presented for the first time in the context of Shoshana Walfish’s exhibition, SKINFOLD responds and converses with Walfish’s paintings series Illusive Bodies; where representation and corporealities are put into interpretational play.

———

Abigail Aleksander and Mary Szydlowska are performers & choreographers based in Brussels. They met in 2019 during their respective studies at P.A.R.T.S. and have been engaged in each other’s work since. SKINFOLD is their first performance collaboration.

Abigail Aleksander works as a performer and collaborator with a variety of art makers including: Philipp Gehmacher, Michiel Vandevelde, Jan Martens and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. She began her dance training in London before graduating with a BA from P.A.R.T.S in 2022. SKINFOLD is her first choreographic work.

Mary Szydlowska’s practice varies between movement, installation and sculptural objects. Since graduating from MA STUDIOS programme at P.A.R.T.S, they’ve been making solo performances touching upon the notions of peripheral, withdrawn and invisible phenomena. Their work has been supported and presented by Beursschwourburg, IKOB Museum, Brussels Gallery Weekend, Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw, workspacebrussels, wp zimmer, CC Strombeek and others.

———

Program :
1:30pm – Doors open
2pm to 5pm – SKINFOLD performance
5:15pm – Artist talk moderated by Persis Bekkering
6:30pm – Doors close

*The performance lasts for three hours, the audience can come, go and return freely. To avoid overcrowding, the performance can host 15 guests at one time, you may need to wait if this number is exceeded.

Credits:

Concept, choreography, performance Abigail Aleksander / Mary Szydlowska Music composition, Hannah Todt Special thanks to Shoshana Walfish, PARTS, Steven De Belder, Steven Peeters.

This project is supported by the Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie (VGC).

Immerse yourself in the universe of “Pierrot Lunaire” by Arnold Schoenberg by attending a concert organized by the Royal Conservatory of Brussels.

A group of young artists, singers, and instrumentalists, are determined to confront the sacred monster of the Second Viennese School: Pierrot Lunaire. Together, and without a conductor, they attempt to capture the power of Arnold Schoenberg’s music, its extraordinary expressive and visionary force.

Don’t miss out on this unique musical experience!

Program:
6:30 PM – Doors Open
7:00 PM – Concert
8:00 PM – Drinks
9:00 PM – Doors Close

Free entry, reservation required.

Location: Jewish Museum of Belgium, Rue des Minimes 21, 1000 Brussels, Belgium.
In partnership with the Royal Conservatory of Brussel s.

As part of the Photo Brussels Festival, the Jewish Museum of Belgium invites you to the closing of its exhibition “Erwin Blumenfeld. Photography. 1930-1950” on 4 February 2024 at 4pm for a guided tour in the presence of the Director of Exhibitions, Bruno Benvindo, and the photographer’s granddaughter, Nadia Blumenfeld Charbit.

This is the last opportunity to discover an exhibition devoted to one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century: Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969). Known for his exceptionally creative fashion photographs, Blumenfeld’s work is polymorphous, combining Dadaist inspiration, political commitment and artistic experimentation.

Featuring over a hundred photographs, the exhibition looks back at the life of this Berlin Jew, who was part of the cultural avant-garde in Amsterdam and then Paris, before being interned when the Second World War broke out. He managed to take refuge in New York at the last minute in 1941, where he enjoyed a successful career, marked by a free exploration of form and colour.

Program :

Doors open at 3:30 p.m.

Guided tour from 4pm to 5pm with Nadia Blumenfeld Charbit (in FR).

Drinks from 5.00 p.m. to 6.00 p.m.

Doors close at 6.30pm.

Price: 10 euros (including access to the exhibition) / Free for students

Registration available here.

We are pleased to invite you to the MultiMemo Dissemination Conference and Holocaust Commemoration Event.

This event is organized by CEJI – A Jewish Contribution to an inclusive Europe, in partnership with the Jewish Museum of Belgium, as part of the EU funded project MultiMemo – Multidirectional Memory: Remembering for Social Justice.

The MultiMemo project proposes an intersectional approach to remembrance – one that underscores the relevance of memory for social justice and the need to face contemporary challenges related to human rights violations, military conflicts and violence, social exclusion, and the migration crisis.

The first MultiMemo dissemination conference and commemoration event aims to promote a new language of commemoration through a multidirectional approach to holocaust remembrance based on the four principles of inclusivity, sustainability, the rescuing of memory, and epistemic justice through arts, academia, urbanism, activism, and policy making.

Date & Time:

21^st of January 2024, 16.00h (CET).

Location:

Jewish Museum of Belgium.

Language

The event will be in English. Translation into French and Dutch will be provided.

Registration

Click here to fill in the registration form. Please note that there is a limited number of seats. Registration closes on January 15th.

The Jewish Museum of Belgium invites you to discover “Les Guerrières de la Paix”, a documentary directed by Hanna Assouline and Jessica Bertaux in 2018. 

In 2014, Israeli and Palestinian women decided to create an informal movement: Women Wage Peace. These women came together around a demand as simple as it was terribly audacious: that their leaders meet again around a negotiating table. In 2018, there are now tens of thousands of them, from all political backgrounds and origins. They are the warriors of peace.  

Through this film and her recent speeches, Hanna Assouline strives to propose a humanist path, “without slogan nor flag”, to transcend the various antagonistic narratives at play and bring everyone together beyond their respective reactionary opinions.

This kind of apolitical approach presented in the documentary is often misunderstood and interpreted as ignoring the complexity of reality. We will examine its properties and relevance. Together we will question the essence of the word “peace”, the evocation of which now frequently arises suspicion and polemics, in order to understand how to restore its unifying character.  

Program :

Doors open 6:30pm

Screening of the film “Les Guerrières de la Paix” at 7:00 pm

Meeting with Hanna Assouline at 8:00 pm, hosted by Sarah Halfin.

Come and (re)discover Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, at the Jewish Museum of Belgium with your family on Sunday, December 10, 2022 from 11 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.

While parents are guided by exhibition director Bruno Benvindo through the Erwin Blumenfeld exhibition, children will enjoy a special Hanukkah craft workshop with our cultural mediator!

We’ll then light the fourth Hanukkah candle together, telling you the story of the Maccabim revolt and the miracle that took place in Jerusalem’s temple in the second century BC.

11 a.m. Guided tour and children’s workshop – with Barbara Cuglietta and Audrey Elbaum

12pm Candle-lighting ceremony, Hanukkah songs

12:30 traditional doughnut tasting

Admission: 12 euros / adult, free for children.

Registration by e-mail to events@mjb-jmb.org

Image : ארכיון השומר הצעיר יד יערי – Hashomer Hatzair Archives Yad Yaari

License : Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic

From September 29, the Jewish Museum of Belgium proposes an exhibition featuring the photographer Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969). Famous for his exceptionnaly creative fashion portraits, Blumenfeld’s artistry is offers a polymorphic work where Dadaïst inspiration, political committment and artistic expérimentations intertwine.

Featuring over a hundred photographs, the exhibition looks back at the life of this Berlin Jew who evolved within the cultural avant-garde movement in Amsterdam and Paris. As WWII broke out, he endured internment in a camp but was able to flee to New York in 1941 where his art blossomed with a free exploration of shapes and colors.

**Hitler, Grauenfresse**
Netherlands, 1938
© The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld 2022

…and then there was EVE is a one woman performative concert, embodied by Jeanna Criscitiello stems from a larger artistic practice that explores feminism and identity. A multi-voiced anti-hero EVE’s inner and outer voice are unfiltered and contradictory and become acts of resistance towards oversimplification of the human experience.

… and then there was EVE performs a collection of EVE heroes from multiple perspectives through invited participants asked to name a personal heroine and identify an object — book, work of art, photograph, and so on — representative of that figure.

New narratives were created by mixing hard fact, intimate confession and the poetics of story-telling. Reinvention, metamorphosis and transmission are reoccurring themes that play a central role in the creation of a feminine archetype with multiple voices – EVE.

In the framework of the exhibition Four Sisters at The Jewish Museum of Belgium, Jeanna Criscitiello will perform a thirty minute selection of her EVE heroes with a highlight on Chantal Akerman’s, Jeanne Dielman. A detailed study of Dielman’s hand gestures that span the three hour opus has been condensed into a seven minute fragment performed on stage and set against an original music composition which is as repetitive and physically exhausting as the endless loop of mundane chores that lead to Dielman’s catastrophic unraveling.

Jeanna Criscitiello’s fascination with facts and fictions that become woven realities is the basis of this performance.

Program :

3:30 pm: Doors open

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm: “Four Sisters” guided tour with Yann Chateigné Tytelmans

5:00 pm – 5:30 pm: Performance EVE

5:30 pm – 6:00 pm: Talk with Jeanna Criscitiello and Barbara Cuglietta

6:00 pm – 7:00 pm: Drink

Price: 10 euros (+ free admission to the “Four Sisters” exhibition)

Tribute to the victims of the SamudaripenOn August 2, 2023, the Jewish Museum of Belgium will pay homage to the victims of the Samudaripen genocide by the Nazis of Roma/Manouches/Sintis/Travellers in Europe.

In collaboration with the ESMA-Carrefour des cultures association, the Jewish Museum of Belgium is organizing a commemoration event on the occasion of the “European Day of Remembrance of the Roma Genocide”, on Wednesday August 2, 2023 at 2:30 p.m. Two conferences will take place: Génocide des Roms : des sources du racisme au génocide nazi by Olivier Bonny (Esma-Carrefour des cultures) and a presentation of research and collection of testimonies and interviews in Eastern countries – by Costel Nastasie of Dignité Rom. The commemoration will be followed with a concert of Balkan Roma style music by Eleonora Mustafovska (singing), Simeon Atanasov (composition, accordion) and Muhi (keyboards) (40 minutes)

Program :

Reception from 2 p.m.

Lectures at 2:30 p.m.

Concert from 3:45 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Farewell drink

Free of charge, reservation required via edu@mjb-jmb.org with mention Commemoration August 2

Image : Memorial fort he murdered Roma and Sinti (Berlin) © Olivier Bonny

On view in its Project Space, the Jewish Museum of Belgium presents the paintings of the Canadian-born Brussels-based artist Shoshana Walfish (°1988). This exhibition focuses on the artist’s research into the representation of the female body, in two scopes. Rooted in the classical pictorial tradition, her works vary in scale and style, from sculptural figuration to figurative abstraction.

Shoshana Walfish questions the idea of the woman as an object and of objects as female bodies. Between surrealism and the absurd, Walfish questions the gaze, the objectification and the narratives produced by history and art history. In a second series, Walfish explores the lush aesthetic allusions associated with body organs, thus mingling corporality with the natural world, science and society.

The Jewish Museum of Belgium invites you to discover a short film directed by Sarah Lederman, which draws its inspiration from the work of filmmaker Chantal Akerman, one of the artists featured in the “Four Sisters” exhibition.

Les Racines de l’eau (synopsis) : Two women, one Ashkenazi Jew from Poland and one Sephardic Jew from Algeria meet in Brussels with the same quest: to find out what their Jewish identity means to them. Their biggest desire is to undergo the water ritual called Mikveh. But they are not welcome in a bath house, being neither married nor orthodox. Nonetheless, they try to claim their heritage on a road trip and own their Judaism.

Program :

Doors open at 6:30pm

Film screening from 7:00 pm

Talk with Shabbes 24/7 Collective and Samuel Kujas (director of IMAJ) from 7:45 pm

Light Dinner from 8:30 pm to 10 pm

Price: 10 euros (+ free admission to the “Four Sisters” exhibition)

free for students

Biography of Sarah Lederman : Sarah Lederman (1994) was born and raised in Brussels, Belgium. She is a film maker and studied both Documentary and Fiction at the The Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema & Sound (RITCS) in Brussels. She finished her Film MFA at Sint-Lucas Brussels with her short film ‘Les Racines de l’Eau’. At UK Jewish Film Festival 2022 she won the Best Short Film award.

‘Licht’, a children’s documentary for KETNET and VRT, which premiered at DOK LEIPZIG, recently won the Ensor for Best Short Film 2023. She just finished her fiction short film ‘Friday, 1st of July’. Both projects were subsidized by VAF.

She specializes in visual intimate stories through fine story telling, honest and pure with a considerate attention for detail. She has a great sensibility for capturing unfolding unique moments. Documentary and fiction film both fascinate her.

“Mirror effect: I am all this, piece by piece. I go out through every pore. I am crossed, invaded, dispossessed. And yet, in this thin skin, I grow, I am alive.” (Marianne Berenhaut)

In Private Collection / Vie Privée, choreographer/performer Ula Sickle invites the audience to explore the exhibition “Four Sisters” through the materiality of the Poupées-Poubelles – transparent nylon tights filled with textiles and everyday objects – made by artist Marianne Berenhaut.

In 1969, a fall of more than four metres left Marianne Berenhaut bedridden for over a year. The accident became an opportunity to question and reinvent her artistic practice: no longer able to engage in large-scale physical productions, it was with the Poupées-Poubelles that she returned to a production that resonated with the demands of feminist thought to which she was close.

For this performance, Ula Sickle invited Sabrina Seifried and Joëlle Laederach to develop a series of wearable pieces in natural latex, a mutable material known for its healing, protective and sensual properties.

The performer Katja Dreyer personifies the Poupées-Poubelles, which she embodies by wearing these clothing creations in a choreography developed by Ula Sickle.

Program :

3:30 p.m.: Doors open

4:00 pm : Start of the performance

16h30 – 17h30 : Talk with Yann Chataigné, Marianne Berenhaut and Ula Sickle (EN)

5:30 pm : Performance

18h00 : Drink

Price: 10 euros (+ free access to the “Four Sisters” exhibition)

Ula Sickle is a Canadian choreographer and performer, living and working in Brussels. From a background in contemporary dance, she works across disciplines, frequently drawing from contemporary music and the visual arts. In 2017-18 she was artist in residence at Ujazdowski Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw and WIELS Arts Center in Brussels. She is currently a PHD researcher at KU Leuven and Luca School of Art. Her performances have been presented across Europe in festivals and venues including the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Actoral (Marseille), MACBA (Barcelona) and the Serralves Museum (Porto), among others. Ula is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Flemish Authorities.

It is common knowledge that war photography is a profession often dominated by men. Julia Pirotte however, like many women photographers, has also worked in war zones. The Polish photographer of Jewish origin, documented the resistance in Marseille during World War II, Jewish families in the internment camp of Bompard and the Kielce Pogrom. Throughout these conflict territories, women often had access to families and children, Julia in particular made it a point to render these moving portraits. Her images played a decisive role in shaping war imagery. By highlighting Julia Pirotte’s photographs and journey, Bruna Lo Biundo, Caroline François and Maja Wolny tell us the specificity of female gaze on war and show us that women are as much transmitters of images as witnesses of war atrocities. The conference will also explore how other women she met along the way have contributed to her work.

The conference will be held in FR/EN
The speakers are : Maja Wolny, Bruna Lo Biundo, Caroline François
Program :
Opening of the doors 18:00
Beginning of the conference 18h30
Drink at 19h30/20h

With the support of the Polish Institute in Brussels

Maja Wolny (* 1976 in Kielce) is a Polish writer, curator of international exhibitions, doctor of humanities.From 1998 to 2002 she was a journalist for the Polish weekly newspaper “Polityka”. She lived for many years in Belgium, where she directed the Eastern European cultural center Post Viadrina in Ghent.In 2016, her novel “Black Leaves” was published in Poland about the life of the Polish-Belgian-Jewish photographer Julia Pirotte and the pogrom in Kielce. The book was translated into Dutch and published by the Bezige Bij with a recommendation by Griet Op de Beeck. “Black Leaves” was included in 2017 in the list of the best novels of 2017 according to the newspaper De Standaard.Maja Wolny has been living in Poland since 2016, in Kazimierz Dolny, where she is involved in the city’s Jewish past. In 2016 and 2017, she traveled alone to Siberia to gather material for her latest novel, “Powrót z Północy” (“The Return from the North”).In 2018, the jury of the Hercule Poirot Prize awarded her the Fred Braeckman Prize for her novel “De boekenmoordenaar”.

Bruna Lo Biundo holds a doctorate in literature and history of French culture. She is a specialist in the representation of women in French culture between the wars. Since 2007, she has worked as a researcher and curator of historical and documentary exhibitions in Paris. She has notably worked for the Mémorial de la Shoah, La contemporaine and Génériques. In 2018, she co-founded the association Past/Not Past which promotes research in the field of cultural heritage. As cultural project manager for Génériques (2013-2018), a center for research and valorization of immigration heritage, she worked on immigrant and refugee women in France in the 20th century and participated in various international conferences on this theme. It was in the context of this work that she discovered the work and fate of Julia Pirotte and her sister Mindla Diament.

Caroline François is a historian, responsible for the temporary and travelling exhibitions of the Shoah Memorial in Paris. She is also an exhibition curator and author of several articles on the question of women in the Shoah. As a lecturer, she regularly participates in the Shoah Memorial’s training program on the following topics: discrimination, gender issues and sexual violence in the context of the genocidal process. In 2016, She curated a temporary exhibition for the Shoah Memorial on women, mainly Jewish, in the French Resistance. Among them were Julia Pirotte and her sister Mindla Diament.

During the Nocturnes, the Jewish Museum will be more than ever a space for encounter and dialogue. In addition to its permanent exhibition on Jewish religion and culture, the museum hosts two temporary exhibitions. Four sisters combines the works of Chantal Akerman, Marianne Berenhaut, Sarah Kaliski and Julia Pirotte, all four women, artists, Jews, and custodians of a memory. 236. Land(es)capes of the 20th Convoy offers, through the photographs of Jo Struyven and the paintings of Luc Tuymans, an artistic look at an exceptional episode in the history of the Second World War. On April 19, 1943, thanks to resistance actions, 236 deportees managed to jump from the train that was taking them to Auschwitz.

More information

WORKSHOP Want to discover Judaism? What rituals and practices are part of Jewish family life? In this workshop on Jewish cultures, the aim is to build bridges, to show the commonalities between cultures and their enriching differences. The workshop is for all audiences, regardless of their background and beliefs.

→ 18:00 (NL) / 19:30 (FR) – Limited places Please send an e-mail to edu@mjb-jmb.org with your name, the number of people you wish to register, the language of the activity and name of the activity.

WORKSHOP The last survivors of the Holocaust share their personal stories with you, documented by the Museum’s archives. A unique and exceptional opportunity to get to know someone who survived the Holocaust and who will explain why bearing witness is still necessary today.

→ 17:30 (FR) / 19:30 (FR) –Limited places Please send an e-mail to edu@mjb-jmb.org with your name, the number of people you wish to register, the language of the activity and name of the activity.

On March 19, 2023 at 5:00 pm, the Union des Etudiants Juifs de Belgique, the MerKaz and the Musée Juif de Belgique will have the pleasure of receiving sociologist Illana Weizman on the occasion of the publication of her latest book “Des blancs comme les autres?” dealing with the blind spot that the fight against antisemitism represents within the anti-racist world.

A panel of speakers from Jewish and anti-racist associations will follow IIlana Weizman’s presentation to discuss her book. We will publish their names on the event in the next few days.

It is a fact that in today’s Jewish communities, there is a prevailing feeling that the fight against antisemitism is the most overlooked aspect of anti-racist campaigns. The loneliness that those involved in the fight against antisemitism too often face or, quite simply, the frequent lack of understanding of the antisemitic phenomenon in anti-racist circles are all elements that reinforce this feeling.

Faced with this observation, the speakers and the audience will discuss several major questions: Why is antisemitism sidelined in anti-racist struggles? How can we rehabilitate the fight against antisemitism and the inclusion of this fight in the anti-racist movement? How can we renew the collaboration between activist organizations and Jewish communities?

This event will be in French.

Chantal Akerman, Marianne Berenhaut, Sarah Kaliski and Julia Pirotte are artists. One makes films, the other sculptures. Another is a painter, the last a photographer. Four Jewish women. Coming from different generations, they emigrated or were born of stateless parents who fled Eastern Europe and the persecutions of the 1930s. All four lived in Brussels and have in common that they lived – directly or through their relatives – through the Occupation, that they saw and suffered deportations, that they lived through the disaster.

Chantal, Marianne, Sarah and Julia are sisters. Sisters from other parents. They have survived, or simply lived, thanks to their own resilience. Like Ruth Elias, Ada Lichtman, Paula Biren and Hanna Marton, The Four Sisters who returned from the death camps and whose testimonies were collected by the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann in the late 1970s, they share the experience of the Shoah. They are custodians of a memory, made up of as many stories as of absences and incomplete words. A gap, a silence, a haunting which they inherited.

These artists have created works, languages, and ways of seeing in and around this hole in history, in their history. Evolving each in a singular world, Chantal, Marianne, Sarah and Julia have sometimes crossed paths, seen each other at the bend of an exhibition or a projection. These women have built themselves with a strength and a commitment that make them today’s models of life and freedom. As Jews, they have questioned the weight of belonging and transmission, the power of a scattered and diasporic culture.

Four Sisters is a choral exhibition that follows the gaze of these four figures, whose lives, placed end to end, cover an entire century of history, where events and places, destruction and emancipation, political transformations and intimate experimentations are connected. Combining works and archives, images and texts, monographic presentations and collective arrangements, Four Sisters interweaves the threads of these life stories in a weaving fashion extending into the present, through the punctuated participation of artists from a younger generation. Within Four Sisters, in the details and folds, memories mingling with fiction, there are gestures, times and fragments whose echoes resonate and compose new patterns, like a memory that can only be formed in sharing.

This exhibition project is realized in partnership with Bozar, the Museum of Photography of Charleroi, the C.A Foundation and the Polish Institute Brussels.

Marianne Berenhaut, The twins, 2000 © Dvir Gallery

Sarah Kaliski

Sarah Kaliski is a “metaphysical” painter whose sensitivity transcends the media. She de-multiplies the body through a painting that is as sensual as it is poetic and marked by history.

Born in 1941 in Brussels, passed away in 2010 in Paris, Sarah Kaliski is the youngest of four children who have distinguished themselves in the arts. Of Jewish and Polish origins, the Kaliski family grew up in Belgium and suffered the tragedies of the 20th century, including the loss of their father deported to Auschwitz. Since then, one can observe in Kaliski’s work the thematic recurrence of the torments inflicted by the Nazis, Belgian culture and identity, violence towards children and the sexual freedom of women.

Julia Pirotte

Artist and fighter, Julia Pirotte’s poignant photographic work is one of the rare and precious visual testimonies of the Resistance.

Born in 1907 in Poland, Julia Pirotte, had to flee her country because of her communist political ideas. She took refuge in Belgium where was given her her first camera. From then on, Pirotte never stopped photographing her daily life as a resistance fighter and activist. In 1940, she fled and joined Free France to continue her resistance activities. In Marseille, she shot numerous photographs documenting daily life under the Vichy regime. After the war, she returned to Poland where she witnessed the massacres in Kielce, which she immortalized in a series of moving photographs. She continued her documentary practice until the end of her life while teaching this medium to the younger Polish generation. She died in Warsaw at the age of 92.

Marianne Berenhaut

Marianne Berenhaut’s installations reveal themselves to the viewer as a waste product. They seem to form a question mark where any attempt at an answer evaporates. Never fixed, always moving, her sculptures are enigmas where a fragile and striking assemblage of narratives, identities and memories collide.

Born in Brussels in 1934, Marianne Berenhaut was separated from her family during the war and found refuge with her twin brother in a Catholic orphanage. Her older brother and her parents did not survive Auschwitz.

Through the technique of assembling eclectic materials, Marianne Berenhaut’s sculptural work addresses the themes of trauma, absence and remembrance. The subtle balance of her works questions the instability of identities, that of women as well as that of the objects that compose them.

Chantal Akerman

A key figure of modern cinema, revered internationally, Chantal Akerman is without a doubt the most important Belgian filmmaker. One of her films was recently ranked “best film of all time” by the British magazine “Sight&Sound”.

Born in 1950 in Brussels into a Jewish family, Chantal Akerman was raised by her father and her mother, an Auschwitz survivor, who left its mark on the filmmaker’s work.

Akerman’s work is as much fiction as documentary. Temporality, femininity, and filiation are the recurring themes of her work. Akerman’s frontal and verist look at daily life, often inhabited by women, questions, through gestures and rituals, the definitions of femininity and the relationship we have with memory.

Died in 2015 in Paris, Chantal Akerman fascinates more than ever as her work remains, even today, of a relevance and a primordial importance.

Through personal stories, which they can present themselves, students become familiar with the history of the 20th convoy to Auschwitz and the resistance that rose up against it.

This exhibition offers an artistic take on an exceptional episode in the history of the Second World War. On 19 April 1943, the Twentieth convoy left the Mechelen transit camp for Auschwitz, with 1,631 Jewish deportees on board. Thanks to acts of resistance onboard and an attack by the resistance along the way, 236 of these deportees managed to jump off the train that was carrying them to their extermination.

The photographer Jo Struyven (b. Sint-Truiden, 1961) reflects on this unique act of rebellion in Western Europe under Nazi administration, showing us the landscapes in which this little-known story took place. These photographs constitute a contemporary “memorial”, providing a response to the indifference that characterises these stripped landscapes today. Although they seem devoid of human presence, they were nevertheless infused with (in)humanity.

Two paintings by Luc Tuymans (b. Mortsel, 1958), which also evoke the destruction of the European Jews and Romani, engage in a dialogue with these photos. In his work, Tuymans has repeatedly explored the relationship between individuals and history, confronting them with their ability to ignore it. The persecution during the Second World War emerged as a theme in his painting practice in the late 1970s.

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno famously said in 1949. The exhibition raises the question of whether art is (im)possible after the Holocaust, through the perspectives of two visual artists.

Organised in partnership with the Auschwitz Foundation, this exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue book (to be published on 19 April 2023), as well as an educational area presenting the testimonies of escapees from the 20th deportation convoy.

Luc Tuymans, Our New Quarters, 1986, oil on canvas, 80.5 x 120 cm (MMK -Germany)

Luc Tuymans, Die Wiedergutmachung, 1989. Oil on board, mounted on plywood,
Oil on canvas; diptych, 36.6 x 43 cm, 39.4 x 51.8 cm (Private collection)

In partnership with PhotoBrussels Festival

This exhibition, Moroccan women – Between ethic and aesthetic, – an original creation of the Centre de la Culture Judéo-Marocaine – revisits the rules of appearance in Moroccan aesthetics, explores the ethics and customs imposed on women as well as the motivations – still at work – of these highly codified customs.

For the first time, ancient productions and recent creations are put in dialogue, in a rich narrative journey presenting a large quantity of objects dating from the 16th century to the present day: traditional and cultic objects, clothes, ornaments, talismans and jewels, archival documents, photographs and drawings, orientalist paintings coming from the Dahan-Hirsch Collection, which holds a special place in the safeguarding of Morocco’s cultural and civilizational heritage, whose great historical and affective value we measure here.

Amulet for synagogue glass suspension – Khemsa
**Yellow copper**
**Fès 1900**

Jacques Aron (Antwerp 1933), architect and urban planner, has taught the history and theory of these disciplines. An honorary professor at the University, he has always devoted himself to writing and visual arts. He is also the author of numerous works on architecture, philosophy and Jewishness, particularly in German-speaking countries.

From the 1990s onwards, he tried his hand at collage, initially on paper but soon in digital form. This artistic practice complements his research into an overall philosophical conception of the European Jewish condition.

Passionate about painting and the history of Western painting, this self-taught artist seized a creative opportunity: the sculpture on the beach at Ostend by the artist Kris Martin, which, in oxidised steel, reproduces the shape of the frame of the polyptych of the Mystic Lamb by the Van Eyck brothers.

The beach altar in Ostend is a nod to the name given by Kris Martin to his sculpture planted on the beach in front of the Palais des Thermes hotel. This empty frame offers walkers the chance to use it as windows evoking different seascapes that change with the light of day and the seasons.

Or perhaps it is an enigma for them, or a structure that they can use as a support for physical exercise, or even to take a photo souvenir, or to photograph themselves in the contemporary age of selfies?

In this series of collages, he links the idea of the empty frame to that of the death of God, as written by Nietzsche in particular. Once the frame is empty, the collage artist’s imagination is free to fill it with a multitude of themes, sometimes drawn from the works of other famous painters such as Ensor, Magritte, Bruegel, Poussin, Géricault, Millet, and others, who rub shoulders with some of the characters of the Van Eyck brothers, or other themes born of his extensive literary culture.

Through the various works on display, visitors are invited to try and work out which artists feature in which collages.

The Arie Mandelbaum exhibition is an original creation of the Jewish Museum of Belgium. Fre-
quently exhibited, the work of painter Arié Mandelbaum (°1939, Brussels) had not yet been the
subject of a retrospective. For the first time, old productions and recent creations engage in dia-
logue here, in a journey which starts in 1957 and ends in 2016.

Arié Mandelbaum, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, began painting at the age of sixteen. As
from the early 1960s, he was considered one of the most promising talents in Belgian painting. His
idiosyncratic and compelling oeuvre continued to develop over the decades that followed. After
the heightened expressionism of his early days, greater restraint followed as of the 1980s, giving
rise to works of disturbing fragility, which he has created to this day.

The exhibition is structured around different themes. We first discover the way in which the artist
deals with intimacy, before politics – especially the anti-authoritarian protest of 1968 – telescopes
his soul-searching. The visit continues with the exploration of the self-portrait and the body, two
themes through which we see the work of Arié Mandelbaum transform into a reflection on trace,
absence and erasure. Political violence, particularly related to (neo)colonialism, then made a
marked return in his work. Over the past two decades, it has become increasingly influenced by
the memory of the Shoah – as a return to what was repressed in this child of the war, who will re-
main a rebel painter all his life.

The works presented come from the collections of the Jewish Museum of Belgium, but also from
institutions such as the Museum of Ixelles, the Museum of the National Bank of Belgium or the
collections of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. A number of private collections have also been
mobilized, in particular those of private individuals and the Belfius Art Collection.

Arié Mandelbaum, Untitled, 1987, 150 x 162 cm, mixed technique on canvas, Hugo Godderis collection, Veurne
© Jan Van Goidsenhoven

Arié Mandelbaum, L’Amandier de Fontenoille, 1989, 162 x 150 cm, acrylic on canvas, Hugo Godderis collection, Veurne © Jan Van Goidsenhoven

Arié Mandelbaum, Le canapé vert n°1, 1968, 1220 x 720 cm, oil and coloured chalk on paper, collection of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Mon © coll. Communauté française de Belgique

Arié Mandelbaum, The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Maurice M’Polo and Joseph Okito – 2 – The Villa Brouwez, 2011, 180 x 210 cm, charcoal and coloured chalk on paper mounted on canvas, Jewish Museum of Belgium, Brussels © Anass El Azhar Idrissi

Arié Mandelbaum, 2021 © Anass El Azhar Idrissi

Arié, rue des Grand Carmes

As an opening for this exhibition, Anass El Azhar Idrissi, a Moroccan photographer living in Brussels since 2002 and a graduate of the Agnès Varda School of Photography, brings a contemporary perspective to Arié Mandelbaum.

He presents Arié, rue des Grands Carmes, a photographic project, carried out between July and September 2021, at the time when Arié Mandelbaum is obliged to leave his studio and change his place of living. This artistic project introduces us to the intimacy of Arié Mandelbaum and acts as an opening onto the future of the artist and his work.

Through the eyes of refugees, a walk in the Marolles in search of Jewish migration from the beginning of the 20th century until the post-war period. Our tools consist of photos, maps and historical documents on tablets. The history of Europe and its migrations, condensed in a district of Brussels!

https://youtu.be/D0_KJB2z3_E