Multi-channel video installation and various sculptural works, Kunstpavillon Innsbruck and Jüdisches Museum Hohenems 2024

Following the founding of the state of Israel, conifers became the preferred species for recreating European landscapes in the country’s mountains, valleys, and desert. For the new European immigrants and survivors of the Holocaust the European forest nevertheless remained a place of both longing and horror. In the coniferous forests of Israel and Austria, I searched for the transformation of Jewish-Arab history, resulting from the concerns, logic, and narratives of Zionism. The act of transferring the image of the enemy from the Nazis to the ‘Arabs’ left no room for a Jewish-Arab identity. Arab-Jewish newcomers and their descendants were consequently assimilated into a national narrative based on European origins. Working between hybrid landscapes and split identities, I aimed to create a lucid space of memory and commemoration that plays with cultural symbols and corporeal reorientation.

 

A reader I put together for the work marks out the historical and cultural space the work engages with and can be found here: ReaderHandFullOfLentils