The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP) calls for the return of 3,300,000 Jews to Poland in order to re-establish the annihilated Jewish community. The movement was initiated by Israeli-born artist Yael Bartana in 2007 and has since spread internationally. It aims to create an atmosphere for a Jewish appearance in Europe. The Jews of today are not the same people who were expelled from Europe—the Europeans of today are not the ones responsible for the ethnic cleansing. This may be the appropriate time to unite again—and change Europe and Israel for the better.

The JRMiP is a response to these times of crisis, when faith has been exhausted and old utopias have failed. The aim of the First Congress of the JRMiP is to ultimately formulate the concrete platform of the movement and collectively imagine the future. The three-day long gathering departs from a letter of the late leader of the movement, Sławomir Sierakowski, found after his assassination, and considers the following questions:

- What should be changed in the EU to welcome the Other?
- What should be changed in Poland to become part of the revived EU?
- What should be changed in Israel to become part of the Middle East?

For the first time since its foundation, JRMiP members assemble, joined by international speakers, to reflect upon particular demands. The movement needs all of you who sympathize with the issues of different Diasporas in general.

Watch the official promo video here.

First International Congress of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP) in Berlin
May 11 – 13, 2012
Daily from 3 – 10.30 pm
Hebbel am Ufer – HAU 1 , Stresemannstrasse 29, 10963 Berlin
In the frame of the 7th Berlin Biennale
More Information on the Congress / Program / Tickets

From Doug Rickard’s terrific site American Suburb X, haunting portraits of Cambodian prisoners at Tuol Sleng taken soon before their execution by the Khmer Rouge (the images were published by Twin Palms in Killing Fields). What is most incredible and most terrifying about these images is the lack of emotion on most of the subjects’ faces. Since these images were taken for prison record keeping, their lack of affect might be taken as a form of resistance; perhaps the prisoners gave no quarter to their tormentors by denying them any permanent evidence of submission. But what if the prisoners didn’t view these photos as photos? Or the photographer as photographer? Perhaps their gazes show no affect because they didn’t imagine these images would ever really be seen. They ceased to be images and became simply information. What the images really show is a medium losing its traditional meaning, being stripped of its power as a mode of communication. Only when we can use these images for good, as way of showing, and preventing, atrocities, can any true power be regained.

Berlin-based artist Cyprien Gaillard once argued that architecture can be experienced at its best in a state of sullen hang-over, and ever since I dragged some visiting friends along to the Soviet War Memorial for a freezing Sunday’s winter walk with a sharp headache and much too little sleep behind us after a long night, I tend to agree.

We had walked through East Berlin’s Treptower Park and came up the steps to the memorial, flanked by two kneeling soldiers hoisting up granite Soviet flags, when we had our moment: The ridiculously oversized field of tombstones came into sight, crowned by the literally gigantic statue of the soldier – carrying a child on his left, a sword in his right, with a crushed swastika underfoot – silhouetted against the sky while darkness fell. It was kind of awe-inspiring and absurd at the same time. It was a magic moment.

Berlin, of course, embodies Europe’s troubled past of the 20^th century like no other, traces of which can be found all over the grey city – most obviously in the architecture and countless monuments from different eras, not seldom cause for controversy, demonstrating the city’s uneasy relationship with its own unwelcome heritage. While the Fascist era has its most dramatic architectural embodiment in the 1936 Olympic Stadium on the western side of the city, the Soviet War Memorial might be its Communist counterpart, and a case in point as to how similar the imagery of the two opposing ideologies actually was.

Imposed in 1949 on the East German government by the Soviet Union as a memorial and cemetery to some of the 80,000 fallen Russian soldiers during the Battle of Berlin, the Soviet Monument has never been popular with East Berliners, and today it is fortunately largely ignored. Which makes it a great place to go and think, as it’s mostly deserted and windswept, in a soothing kind of way. The magic moment never fails to impress – particularly on a cold and rainy winter evening with a severe hangover.

Photography by Kai von Rabenau

“Llik your Idols is an intimate survey of a VERY particular time in downtown NYC – the mid 1980s – when the fallout of a decrepit city manifested itself through the psyches of young and wild artists, musicians and filmmakers banging into each other in the scum drenched streets. Sex, drugs, violence and rock’n’roll took its final leap out the window before the clean up crew came to town. They were good times, lovely times and this documentary brings it back in all its cheap rent psychosis.”
(Thurston Moore)

Tonight, March 10, 2012 at 7.30 pm:
Film Screening of Llik your Idols (free entrance)
KW Institute for Contemporary Art , Auguststrasse 69, 10117 Berlin
In the frame of the exhibition YOU KILLED ME FIRST – The Cinema of Transgression

Llik your idols
France 2007, 70 Min., engl. OV
Documentary about the Cinema of Transgression by Angélique Bosio
Film screening in the presence of the director

Skateboarding in the 1960s, photos by Bill Eppridge for LIFE magazine. Posted last week by HUH. magazine.

Dodo received her formal education at the prestigious Schule Reimann and went on to become a successful costume and fashion illustrator. She reached the peak of her artistic career in the years 1927 to 1929, when she created a string of caricaturally drawn, brightly coloured gouaches for the Berlin-based satirical weekly Ulk. These pictures depicted the mondaine life of the modern urban socialite, as well as the increasing alienation of the sexes. With sharp contours, oscillating between Art Déco and the New Objectivity, Dodo managed to capture the essence of the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the late twenties with which she was so intimately familiar.

This first retrospective, presented by the Art Library in Berlin, features around 120 of her works from all periods of her life: mondaine fashion illustration, illustrations for Ulk, her ‘pictures of the unconscious’ (created in Zurich in 1933 while undergoing psychoanalysis), illustrations for Jewish magazines and works created in exile in London.

Opening tonight, February 29, 7 pm:
Dodo (1907–1998) – A Life in Pictures
Dates: March 1 – May 28, 2012
Art Library
Matthäikirchplatz
10785 Berlin

Image: Dodo, “In der Loge” for the satirical weekly Ulk, 1929

Boris Mikhailov
Time is Out Of Joint
24.02.-28.05.2012

Berlinishe Galerie
Alte-Jakobstraße 124-128
10969 Berlin