Saturday, April 4, 2009

Exhibition: Tel Aviv Bauhaus Architecture on View in Munich

Exhibition: Tel Aviv Bauhaus Architecture on View in Munich

(ISJM) In conjunction with the year-long exhibition City without Jews: The Dark Side of Munich’s History (September 24, 2008 through August 30, 2009), curated by Bernhard Purin at the Jewish Museum of Munich, the Museum is also mounting several exhibits under the rubric "Places of Exile."

The second of these exhibits, a photo-essay by Israeli photographer Yigal Gawze,
Minchen ve'Tel Aviv opened on March 25, 2009 and runs through June 7, 2009. ‘Fragments of a Style’ looks at the Bauhaus architecture of Tel Aviv, celebrating its 100th anniversary in April 2009. The photos emphasis the "White City," the largest concentration of Bauhaus-inspired and other modern pre-World War II architecture in the world. According to the organizers, "At the same time ‘Minchen ve’Tel Aviv’ traces the life histories of four Jewish artists who lived and worked in Munich for many years and for whom Tel Aviv did not just became a place of exile after 1933 but also a new home."

You can download the catalog here:

Gawze's photo-essay will later be shown in Prague and Berlin.

City without Jews: The Dark Side of Munich’s History

The following rationale and description of
City Without Jews comes from the Museum website:

Throughout 2008 Munich celebrated its 850th anniversary. Such jubilees are often seen as occasions to look back on a city’s history with pride, to identify with it, and to awaken the residents’ awareness of its history. But how is a museum—whose task is to promote the history and culture of a certain section of the community—supposed to react to such a festival year, when for more than 400 years in the city’s 850-year history, it was involuntarily and often forcefully excluded from taking part?

In its contribution to the city’s anniversary, the Jewish Museum Munich has chosen to trace precisely those times during the last 850 years when Jews were not allowed to live there, when Munich was a City without Jews. At the same time, the reasons for their expulsion, persecution, and settlement prohibitions have been highlighted and the issue of the Dark Side of Munich's History broached.

The twelve exhibits, which render predominantly negative events in the city’s history visible, are complemented by video boards in the exhibition. Students at the University for Television and Film in Munich have collated statements by historians and experts in the fields of literature, politics, and cultural affairs, related to Munich’s topography and which refer to events of exclusion, persecution, and annihilation that actually happened. This allows visitors to the exhibition "City without Jews: The Dark Side of Munich’s History" to see the objects in a broader historical context while at the same time linking them to specific sites in Munich.

Curator: Bernhard Purin
Assistance: Tatjana Neef

1 comment:

Hels said...

Thanks for that. I have added the link to my Tel Aviv Bauhaus post.

I paid particular attention to the sentence "At the same time Minchen ve’Tel Aviv traces the life histories of four Jewish artists who lived and worked in Munich for many years and for whom Tel Aviv did not just became a place of exile after 1933 but also a new home."

Did any/all of the four study at the Bauhaus? The photographs of the women have a very Bauhaus feel to them.