Fragments of Life and Art

As part of “TACHELES – Year of Jewish Culture in Saxony,” HELLERAU’s “Fragments of Life and Art” program series explores various facets of Jewish experience and artistic practice. The series takes as its starting point historical and artistic connections to HELLERAU that continue to resonate today.

A special focus is on the artist and dancer Noa Eshkol, whose comprehensive body of work and legacy is being presented in Dresden for the first time. Three works by Omer Krieger, Noé Soulier, and the Dance On Ensemble, as well as by Katja Erfurth, engage in different ways with Noa Eshkol’s artistic creation and unique notation system. The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group will also offer insights into her extensive choreographic legacy. In addition, HELLERAU, in cooperation with the Galerie neugerriemschneider, is presenting an exhibition featuring Noa Eshkol’s famous tapestries as well as drawings, photographs, and videos. In their choreographic solo works, Nitsan Margaliot and Yasmeen Godder convey deeply personal, formative imprints of this legacy and the present on their bodies. The spatial installation “Jüdische Ossis IV” by the Institut für Neue Soziale Plastik turns its gaze to the recent past and explores private spaces of freedom under authoritarian regimes. For many Jews, these places also became spaces for the search for a new Jewish identity between religion, secularism, and reform. The exhibition “Jüdische Ossis” explores these connections through walk-in installations depicting a Moscow kitchen and a GDR living room, examining the possibilities for freedom back then—and today in dealing with Putin’s Russia.

With “Fragments of Life and Art,” HELLERAU aims to make visible the various inscriptions, ruptures, and continuities of Jewish life and to relate them to one another. The series is intended as an invitation to explore these perspectives in a dialogue between art, history, and the present, together with the audience.