The director of the Museum of Underground Prisoners in Jerusalem has censored works from two exhibitions on view at the museum as part of the Jerusalem Biennale for Contemporary Jewish Art. The Jewish Art Salon, whose exhibition Jerusalem Between Heaven and Earth was curated by Ori Soltes, had to move five artists’ work to another venue, the Bezeq Building. Amsterdam-based artist Maarten van der Heijden’s Shoah art is among the censored works.
David Sperber wrote about van der Heijden’s provocative artworks, and about Helene Aylon’s exhibition, which he co-curated with Dvora Liss..
Postmemory: The Censored Art of Maarten van der Heijden
… “Van der Heijden’s works are created by digital means. At first glance, they are uplifting, beautiful, and pleasant. His series Grotesques (2010) with its bright colors, calls to mind Buddhist mandalas filled with repetitive forms and images. A closer look, though, reveals that the forms consist of complex and appalling images of naked bodies, all from photographs taken by American soldiers who liberated the concentration camps at the end of World War II”…
Read the full article here.
Afterword: For the Children, An installation by Helène Aylon
…”Whereas American Jewish feminist artists in the 1970’s and the 1980’s did not foreground their Jewishness but emphasize their gender identification in a collective movement, since the 1990’s, Aylon’s engagement with a critical stance related to her Jewish identity constitutes a ground-breaking, radical social avant-garde and sets itself a goal to effect changes in the Jewish religious world”…
Read the full article here.
