12 – 26 October 2023
Mon – Fri 10am – 3pm
Saturdays 11am – 4pm
Bath House Galleries
Huddersfield, UK
HD1 3DR
The cryptojudaic reading room at Bath House Gallery launches a new phase in the Judaica project, a line of artistic research led by Ben Spatz. The first decade of the Judaica project (2012–2022) was an open-ended exploration of contemporary diasporic jewish identity through songwork. It adapted a laboratory theatre methodology to the context of university-based artistic research and generated numerous written and audiovisual publications.
cryptojudaica (2023–) marks the shift from an open-ended approach emphasizing diaspora and methodology toward a more focused intention to disentangle jewishness from whiteness and develop new forms of institutionality in apprenticeship to black and indigenous studies. Historically, cryptojews were those forced to undergo conversion who nevertheless continued to practice jewish ways of living in secret. Here the term is used to name the complex relations between jewishness and whiteness in the present, which involve a mixture of coerced assimiliation, voluntary complicity, and critical resistance.
Works exhibited:
@cryptojudaica (Instagram)
three-channel video
Postmemory: Fragments (46:10)
Postmemory: Crypt (47:22)
two-channel video
the human ceremony (8:14)
one-channel video
reading room (daf yomi)
participatory installation
desk, books, worksheets
Credits:
Nazlıhan Eda Erçin, Lab Team (2017)
Agnieszka Mendel, Lab Team (2017)
Caroline Gatt, Lab Guest (2017)
Lxo Cohen, Research Associate (2022-23)
Tiffany Lethabo King, author of The Black Shoals (2019)
