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.
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.
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.
Thisexhibition 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 Jews of Mogador M. Girard Essaouira, 1949
Necklace – Lebba Gold-plated silver and semi-precious stones Fès, 19ème
Encre sur parchemin Fès, 19ème
Jewish women in fiesta dress John-Frédérick, Lewis 1805-1876 Grande-Bretagne, 1836
Amulet of protection for travel Ink on parchment Fès, 19èmeLarge wedding dress – Keswa l’Kbira Rabat, early 20th century
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.
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!
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