{"id":538503,"date":"2026-07-13T01:33:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T01:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/538503\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T01:33:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T01:33:10","slug":"a-venice-art-installation-grapples-with-its-jewish-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/538503\/","title":{"rendered":"A Venice art installation grapples with its Jewish history"},"content":{"rendered":"

Synagogues often give those inside them a sense of connection to the heavens, although they do not normally float through the sky. But in Nabatele, a large, outdoor installation by artist and architect Anna Kamyshan, a shtetl-style synagogue appears to hover over Venice<\/a>, perched on a massive rock suspended above water.<\/p>\n

The work, an official collateral event of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, will be on view from July 16 to September 16 at Arsenale Nord in the Castello district of Venice.<\/p>\n

It will be presented in collaboration with the Montreal<\/a> Jewish Museum and curated by Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks.<\/p>\n

At once playful, spiritual, and unsettling, Nabatele imagines a Jewish<\/a> house of worship without ground beneath it.<\/p>\n

Its windows are continuously lit, evoking the Ner Tamid, the light that is always kept lit in synagogues to symbolize God\u2019s presence and the Temple, thus suggesting a fragile but persistent source of illumination at a time of war, displacement, and uncertainty.<\/p>\n

\"AnnaAnna Kamyshan (credit: TEA MONSELESAN, FANNI BARANYI)Grappling with Venice’s Jewish history<\/p>\n

\u201cNabatele is a very personal project, created while I was in search of my personal identity,\u201d Kamyshan, who lives in London, has said.<\/p>\n

That personal search is embedded in the work. Kamyshan is Ukrainian<\/a>, of Jewish heritage and Russian origins, and her biography echoes the questions the installation raises about belonging, exile, memory, and the impossibility of neatly containing one\u2019s identity within borders.<\/p>\n

The title itself carries several layers of meaning. It draws on nabat, a Biblical Hebrew word meaning a call of warning or alarm in moments of danger, and softens it with the Yiddish diminutive suffix \u201c-ele.\u201d<\/p>\n

What follows from this is a word that suggests both danger and tenderness, an alarm transformed into something more intimate, evoking a soft voice that refuses to disappear.<\/p>\n

The image of a synagogue suspended above Venice also resonates deeply with the city\u2019s own Jewish history.<\/p>\n

Venice was home to the world\u2019s first Jewish ghetto, established in 1516, and its synagogues were tucked away, often hidden on upper floors.<\/p>\n

Kamyshan\u2019s installation reverses that history of concealment. Here, the synagogue is elevated, visible, and illuminated, not hidden from view but held aloft above the city.<\/p>\n

Further, the work draws on the memory of the wooden synagogues of Eastern European shtetls, most of which were destroyed in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Rather than reconstructing one of these vanished buildings as a conventional memorial, Nabatele turns it into an apparition: A structure that is present but unreachable, rooted in memory rather than in land.<\/p>\n

The floating rock inevitably recalls Ren\u00e9 Magritte\u2019s 1959 painting\u00a0The Castle of the Pyrenees, part of the Israel Museum\u2019s collection, in which a stone mass crowned by a castle hovers over the sea.<\/p>\n

But Kamyshan\u2019s version replaces the castle with a synagogue, shifting the image from surrealist fantasy toward Jewish history, specifically the longings of Jews in exile and the concept of a homeland that may exist only culturally and spiritually.<\/p>\n

\u201cNabatele explores the tension between gravity and buoyancy, the gentle effort of existing uprooted,\u201d Kamyshan said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether the structure ever had roots or a foundation, or instead always floated freely above the ground; whether it seeks a place to land or prefers its airy autonomy\u2026 these questions remain a mystery.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also described the light in the synagogue windows as central to the work\u2019s meaning. \u201cThe constant light from the synagogue windows symbolizes for me that inner flame that is not extinguished by any turbulence, and that persists in instability.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not trying to represent a state or a flag,\u201d Kamyshan added. \u201cIt is more like a condition. Something floating, something that refuses to be pinned down.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a technical level, the work is ambitious as well. The installation is a helium-filled, double-membrane structure that rises to 25 meters, combining architecture, engineering, and visual illusion.<\/p>\n

Its design and engineering were led by Aerotrope\u2019s Christopher Hornzee-Jones, with calculations and engineering analysis by Tensys.<\/p>\n

But despite its scale and technical complexity, Nabatele is not a monument in the usual sense, because it is constantly in motion. It moves with the wind, soars into the sky, or hovers near the water and the rock.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe understand the project as a point of connection over the long term,\u201d said Alyssa Stokvis-Hauer, the artistic director of the Museum of Jewish Montreal, where Nabatele will eventually find a home.<\/p>\n

\u201cConceived to travel, Nabatele seeks to broaden its cultural reach and foster dialogue across communities and cultures,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

According to Stokvis-Hauer, \u201cThese goals are what led our museum to organize the project as a collateral event at 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and become its future North American host.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Synagogues often give those inside them a sense of connection to the heavens, although they do not normally…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":538504,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46,2971,6234,82925,107916,11652],"class_list":["post-538503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-italy","tag-jewish-history","tag-synagogue","tag-temple","tag-venice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}