Why do you stand at the door?

About the project

The title of the exhibition WHY DO YOU STAND AT THE DOOR? is taken from the Yiddish folk song 'Lomir Zikh Iberbetn' (Let's Make Up).

The lyrics are a call to love, as well as a reference to the fear of the other's departure. The line is used here as a metaphor for the compulsory and successive migrations of Eastern European Jewish communities to the gates of the West. A forced nomadism, which can also be read on the first and last pages of the Yiddish cultural productions housed in the Jewish Museum of Belgium. Some were published in Kyiv, Warsaw, Vilnius and then sealed in Johannesburg, New York and are now kept in Brussels, Ghent or Antwerp.

These seals are a starting point for a poetic exploration of a fragmented collective memory, within which the women poetesses testimonies reconstruct historical intervals of displacement, a history of migration omitted by books presenting national narratives.

The history of Yiddish publications is inextricably linked to those who speak the language. Its use has survived the qualifications of zhargon thanks to a culture that transcends notions of, national borders and cultures. The Judeo-Germanic vernacular was transformed by migrations through Eastern Europe by those who practised it from the Middle Ages in the Rhine Valley to Birobidzhan.2 Yiddish is an inherently diasporic language.

in the project space of the Jewish Museum of Belgium, the works of Nikolay Karabinovych subtly combine references to Jewish culture and its representations in literature, music and audiovisual archives

In an active and non-exhaustive voice, Nikolay Karabinovych questions the writing of a history fragmented by migrations, the knowledge produced by the diaspora and the meaning the archives of the Jewish Museum of Belgium are afforded today. Objects placed on graphic-like drawings in museum windows blur the differences between the artist's work and the archives selected from the Yiddish library. The artist asks the question of how we should look at the preserved objects, their status as artefacts in an ethnographic writing of Jewish culture and the institutional narratives surrounding them in Brussels, Moscow or Odesa. The door is used as a metaphor to open up new readings, but also as a reference to the history of the Jewish Museum in Belgium, whose door remains a reference to a heinous anti-Semitic event.

In this space, the artist's personal stories are linked to those of the displaced authors. The exhibition juxtaposes literary archives and photographs representing the Jewish diaspora with fictional writing proposed by Nikolay Karabinovych.