As a prelude to the retrospective of French photographer Mathieu Pernot, from April 30 the Jewish Museum of Belgium presents a group exhibition featuring works by Armando Andrade Tudela, Marianne Berenhaut, Heidi Bucher, Miriam Cahn, Latifa Echakhch, Sigalit Landau, Alina Szapocznikow, Naama Tsabar et Lawrence Weiner.
A project by Eloi Boucher in collaboration with the Jewish Museum of Belgium
Ellis Island is “that narrow sandbar at the mouth of the Hudson”, an islet facing Manhattan. It was the main point of entry for many communities arriving on American soil between 1892 and 1924. Nearly sixteen million emigrants – mostly from Europe, but also from Arab countries – passed through here, undergoing a series of medical and psychological examinations, as well as a change of identity. Georges Perec, a writer of Polish-Jewish origin, offers us a detailed description of this “non-place” in a text written in 1979. A utopian place where we forget ourselves, where our bodies and identities are transformed, a place where we also leave room for dreams and the hope of a better world.
Following on from Perec’s story, the exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Belgium focuses on how contemporary artists deal with the theme of exile, and how they confront the world as a place of dispersion, confinement and wandering. Ellis Island explores uprootedness and emigration as a mental or physical state, but also as a creative “catalyst” where artistic processes of assemblage and fragmentation are brought into play.
