Digital Bridges across Eastern European Jewish History

Funding: Сentropa

Partners: Ukrainian Union of Jewish Students (UUJS), NGO «Ukrainian-German Cultural Society of Chernivtsi» at Dumkovy Spiritual Center / University of Chernivtsi, «Mnemonic» Research Center for Memory Policy and Social History, EcoVisio, Galician Jewish Museum / Żydowskie Muzeum Galicja , Asortymentna kimnata, proto produkсiia

Duration: May 2022 — April 2023

Budget: 11,470 EUR

Coordinator: Alona Karavai

Contact: office@insha-osvita.org

Nikita Kadan will work on the project in cooperation with local video artists Yarema Malashuk and Roman Himei. As part of the project, we will hold an exhibition of works by Nikita Kadan, based on an artistic study of the Holocaust in Ivano-Frankivsk (then Stanislavov), with a special focus on the mass murders of Jews during the so-called Bloody Sunday, October 12, 1941. The study is based on the texts of survivors (such as Elizabeth Freundlich) and on photographs of the landscape where the massacres took place. A series of fiction texts based on real-life stories from Jewish survivors of the holocaust, edited by Nikita Kadan, video art shot underwater near the lake near the Jewish graves, and a performance by artists reading the texts. The main venue of the exhibition will be the Museum of the City of Ivano-Frankivsk, an additional venue may be the local synagogue of Ivano-Frankivsk (upon agreement with the rabbi).

The active phase of the war, which is the background of the study and actualizes the topic of mass violence, will most likely also affect the artistic outcome of the study. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Nikita Kadan reflects a lot on the image of the landscape and the soil in his work, alluding to the thesis that «the landscape is a nameless grave».

You can follow the progress of the project on our Facebook page and the page of our partners in the Asortymentna kimnata project space.