New Exhibit Opening: “Henna, Love, and Light: Jewish Life and Art in Siona Benjamin’s India”
Opening Sunday, February 2nd | 3 p.m.
In-person or online via Zoom
Register here for Feb. 2nd
Fordham University Rose Hill Campus
Walsh Library, 4th Floor | O’Hare Special Collections Room
The exhibit, curated by Amy Levine-Kennedy, Mallory Roof FCRH ‘26, and Magda Teter, will be on view from January 30 until March 28, 2025.
In 2011, Siona Benjamin, an intercultural artist born in India to a Bene Israel Jewish community, returned to her country of birth on a Fulbright India-US fellowship. During her stay, she traveled across the country, conducting research and interviewing Jews in India.
The fruit of the fellowship was a series of forty photo-collage paintings, “Faces: Weaving Indian Jewish Narratives” and a documentary “Blue Like Me: The Art of Siona Benjamin.” In the fall semester, we highlighted five of the forty pieces in a large bi-campus retrospective “Yearning to Breathe: The Art of Siona Benjamin.” This current exhibition, “Henna, Love, and Light: Jewish Life and Art in Siona Benjamin’s India,” brings to Fordham five additional pieces from the series.
These five pieces serve as anchors that link the present and the past. Around Siona Benjamin’s art are photographs taken by the artist’s parents and family members. In the 1950s, Siona Benjamin’s parents, Judah and Sophie Benjamin, traveled across India photographing synagogues and houses of prayer, capturing the range and diversity of the Indian Jewish community: from splendid metropolitan synagogues to small rural prayer halls. The cache of photographs in Siona Benjamin’s possession thus documents an aspect of Jewish history, now threatened by oblivion.
Like Siona Benjamin’s art, some of the old family photographs underscore how much the life and culture of Jews in India were very much of India. Henna, saris, glass lamps of synagogue lights meld with modern suits and classic fedoras becoming one. Indian and Jewish, traditional and modern–all form a distinct Indian Jewish identity.
