Hommage à Isaac Bashevis Singer

Exhibition curator: Beata Jablonská

Exhibiting authors from the AFAD: Olja Triaška Stefanović, Jana Machatová, Andrea Pézman, Tomáš Klepoch, Palo Macho, Jana Hojstričová, Silvia Saparová, Stanislav Stankoci, Miroslav Žolobanič, Ivan Csudai

About the project:

The exhibition Hommage à Isaac Bashevis Singer is the result of a collaboration between the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, organized on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the death of Isaac Bashevis Singer. By its focus, it belongs to those events that go beyond the framework of exchange exhibition cooperation. Not only by referring directly to the literary legacy of an important writer, but especially by trying to create a spatial hypertext book in a wide range of art media, a kind of cultural encyclopedia of remembrance, created in dialogue between artists from two close cultural contexts. Compiled from their reader's reflection on Singer's short stories, but not as an illustration of his narrative mastery, but in a pictorial reflection on their Central European essence. The one that is reflected in the repeatedly lived stories of our living space - exposed to an uncertain fate in an externally motionless time, to cultivated self-deception and, above all, to humor, in the midst of an ever-lurking tragedy.

Isaac Bashevis Singer is said to have been one of the greatest narrators and chroniclers of the "little history" of the 20th century. His genre-rich novels and short stories remind us that the Central European area was once rich in ethnic and cultural diversity, which after II. World War II and the Holocaust is an irretrievably and probably forever lost past.

The selection of exhibiting artists was not determined by the specific medium, although this is perhaps the first and last limit of their thinking. The concept of the exhibition went the way of materializing memory in its two forms: memory and recollection and their counterpart - forgetting. For even the existence and identity of a Jewish nation living in the diaspora for many years would be scattered in a relentless human history without cultivating a culture of memory.

The commemoration of the imaginative Singer's world is one of the aims of the exhibition, but not just a reverent reminder of an important author. This exhibition could be created thanks to the long-term cooperation and mutual support of both art academies, from academic activities, through many research projects, to specific artistic activities. It is another step in building a space where, with the help of close literary, cultural and historical themes, not only "declared on paper" declared closeness is built.