Artist Yevgeniy Fiks is a leader in Yiddish contemporary art, and explores its boundaries not only in its aesthetic forms, but also in its self-definition as a political and cultural force. His exhibition “Himl un Erd” is a selection of the melding of the Yiddish language and mind to the Soviet cosmonaut project — but this is only one glimpse of the Jewish relationship to imagination and power. Fiks also explores its failures, successes and blurring lines of the Soviet Birobidzhan project for a Jewish national home in the Far East.
A natural next step is to envision a post-national Yiddish art. As Fiks describes, “While rejecting the dictates of cultural imperialism, Yiddish contemporary art is at the same time open to everything progressive locally and globally.” This is a reference to his Yiddishland Pavillion project, a rebellion against the defined national boundaries of the Venice Biennale. The Pavillion is a series of Yiddish art that is scattered amongst various national exhibitions.
These polarities of Yiddish identification with the Soviet project, its elusiveness to be one with the state boundaries it is given, and a conscious rejection of those lines are, put together, a very thoughtful and artistically engaging contemplation on self and world.
Rabbi Zach Golden will interview Fiks on Sunday, Dec. 7 at 2 PM Pacific / 5 PM Eastern In what will be an eye-opening examination of art, the state, and Yiddishkeit itself.
Register here.
About Yevgeniy:
Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has been living and working in New York since 1994. Fiks has produced many projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West, among them: “Lenin for Your Library?” in which he mailed V.I. Lenin’s text "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” to one hundred global corporations as a donation for their corporate libraries; “Communist Party USA,” a series of portraits of current members of Communist Party USA, painted from life in the Party’s national headquarters in New York City; and “Communist Guide to New York City,” a series of photographs of buildings and public places in New York City that are connected to the history of the American Communist movement.
Fiks’ work has been shown internationally. This includes exhibitions in the United States at Winkleman and Postmasters galleries (both in New York) Mass MoCA, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Marat Guelman Gallery in Moscow; Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, and the Museu Colecção Berardo in Lisbon. His work has been included in the Biennale of Sydney (2008), Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011), and Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015).