https://polin.gridaly.com/live/agenda

Exhibiting Loss: Discovering New Museum Possibilities

18:30 - 20:00

Stage B

Chair/Respondent: Galit Hasan-Rokem

• Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz On the Search of Lost Time and Space: The Virtual Shabbat Room by Isidor Kaufmann and Maya Zack
• Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman On Ephemeral Homes: Reflections on Sukkot, Museums and Contemporaneity
• Jeffrey Shandler YIVO’s Lost Museum of the Homes of the Past

   Although Jewish museums are generally thought of as stable institutions that present the material of cultural heritage, their history has entailed considerable upheavals, reflecting the turbulent history of the past 125 years. This panel examines the past and present of museums not as sites of permanence and endurance, but of instability and loss, by considering three different case studies involving Ashkenazic Jews in a transnational diaspora: the history of the YIVO Institute’s unrealized museum that sought to document European Jewish life in the midst of its destruction during World War II; the Vienna Jewish Museum’s recent revisiting of Isidor Kaufmann’s Gute Stube, a signature lost installation, originally created for the museum at the turn of the twentieth century; the Sala-Manca Group’s series of museum projects interrogating the sukkah as an object for addressing exile, displacement, as well as the erasure and recovery of past homes. In all of these instances, museums are engaged both as establishments of Jewish patrimony and as venues for challenging the values invested in these institutions.