הימל און ערד

Himl un erd

Yiddish Cosmos

An exhibition by Yevgeniy Fiks
Sunday, November 18–Sunday, December 16, 2018

Opening Reception
Sunday, November 18th, 6–9pm

Music by Miryem-Khaye Seigel and Ilya Shneyveys at 7:30 pm

*RSVP here for the opening*

Produced by Victoria Anesh and Mordecai Walfish

For more information, contact Victoria Anesh at victoria.anesh@gmail.com or 917-498-7987.

The exhibit will be open to the public Sundays, 1–6pm, and Mondays & Wednesdays, 4–7 pm, November 18–December 16.

Special artist-led exhibition tour on Sunday, December 16th, at 4pm.

Address
Stanton Street Shul
180 Stanton Street
New York, NY 10002

What does the Soviet space program have to do with Yiddish culture?
Multidisciplinary artist Yevgeniy Fiks presents Heaven and Earth (Yiddish Cosmos), an exhibition that uncovers the surprising connections between the Eastern European Jewish experience, futurist utopianism, and the Soviet space program. In this exhibition, Fiks forges a speculative narrative of Yiddish culture based on ideas of daring imagination, universality, and scientific progress.

Mixing fact and fiction, Yiddish Cosmos evokes 20th century futuristic utopianism and the practical achievements of space science from an Eastern European Jewish perspective. Artist Yevgeniy Fiks speculates on the idea of the cosmos and how in the Soviet context it would become the epitome of the homeland for a diasporic people. If the 20th-century Eastern European Jewish narrative is one of longing for universalism and scientific progress, it is cosmos as a “homeland” that most perfectly embraces those dreams.

Featuring works on paper, objects, and archival materials, Fiks uses this exhibition to explore real and imaginary connections between an invented language of interplanetary communication and the Yiddish language, all the while juxtaposing the Soviet space program’s imagery with Soviet Jewish community and Yiddish culture.

About the artist
Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972, and has been living and working in New York since 1994. Fiks has produced numerous projects on the subject of the post-Soviet dialogue in the west. Fiks’s work has been shown internationally. This includes exhibitions in the United States at Winkleman Gallery and Postmasters Gallery (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.

About the exhibition site
Stanton Street Shul is one of the few tenement shuls still left of the 700 LES congregations. Stanton Street Shul is the first American home of Congregation Bnai Jacob Anshe Brzezan (“Sons of Jacob, People of Brzezan”). Incorporated in 1893, the community of Jewish immigrants from the town of Brzezan in Southeast Galicia, (formerly Austria-Hungary, then Poland, now Ukraine), created their place of worship from an existing structure on the site in 1913, within a thriving Lower East Side Jewish community. The shul has since changed with the neighborhood, but has struggled to preserve its old country roots.