Artist Izhar Patkin Speaks At The Jewish Museum, 09/27

Related: Izhar Patkin, The Jewish Museum, The Messiah's glAss

In conjunction with the new exhibition, Izhar Patkin: The Messiah's glAss, The Jewish Museum is presenting four programs in September and October. Highlights include a discussion with artist Izhar Patkin in the Museum's galleries on Thursday, September 27; and screenings of French director Nurith Aviv's trilogy of films about the Hebrew language, FROM ONE LANGUAGE TO ANOTHER, on Thursdays, September 27, October 11 and October 18. These programs are free with museum admission.

For further information regarding programs at The Jewish Museum, the public may call 212-423-3200, or visit the Museum's website at TheJewishMuseum.org/patkinprograms.

Artist Izhar Patkin will speak about his work, currently on view in Izhar Patkin: The Messiah's glAss. He will connect his art and themes to the new exhibition, Crossing Borders: Manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries. This program is the first in The Jewish Museum's new series, Writers and Artists Respond, featuring thought-provoking discussions and performances led by artists, musicians and writers in the Museum's galleries.

Izhar Patkin was born in Israel in 1955 and has lived in the United States since 1977. He gained recognition in the mid-1980s with The Black Paintings, done in white ink on black rubber curtains. These were an inventive visual adaptation of Jean Genet's play The Blacks: A Clown Show. His work has been collected in depth by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Open Museum, Tefen; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and many other prominent institutions. He has exhibited extensively worldwide. The artist's major mid-career museum survey, The Wandering Veil, is currently on view at the Tel Aviv Museum and at The Open Museum in Tefen, northern Israel. The show will travel to MASS MoCA in 2013.

Tickets: FREE with Museum admission. Stools will be provided on a first come, first served basis. Museum hours are Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, 11am to 5:45pm; Thursday, 11am to 8pm; and Friday, 11am to 4pm. Museum admission is $12.00 for adults, $10.00 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for children under 12 and Jewish Museum members. Admission is free on Saturdays. For general information on The Jewish Museum, the public may visit the Museum's website at http://www.thejewishmuseum.org or call 212-423-3200. The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, Manhattan.

In Israeli-born French filmmaker Nurith Aviv's documentary trilogy, FROM ONE LANGUAGE TO ANOTHER, writers, poets, artists and translators from various countries and ethnic backgrounds examine the relationship between their native languages and Hebrew, and between different levels within Hebrew itself.

Nurith Aviv is the first woman to be recognized as a Director of Photography by the Centre national de la cinématographie (National Center of Cinematography) in France. She has worked on over 100 films, both fiction and documentaries, collaborating with such filmmakers as Agnès Varda, Réné Allio and Amos Gitai, and has directed ten documentaries of her own. A retrospective of her films was shown in the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris in 2008.

Thursday, September 27 at 4 pm: TRADUIRE/TRANSLATING (2011, 70 minutes), the third part of the trilogy, is receiving its United States premiere. The film explores the challenges that face translators who work to bring Hebrew texts to the rest of the world. The translators discuss the challenges they face in bringing works of ancient, medieval and contemporary Hebrew literature to other audiences. Nurith Aviv will introduce the film, and participate in a Q&A with artist Izhar Patkin following this screening.

Thursday, October 11 at 11:30 am: FROM LANGUAGE TO LANGUAGE (2004, 52 minutes), the first part of the trilogy, foreign-born Israeli poets, writers and artists discuss the difficult relationship between their mother tongues and their acquired Hebrew. As acclaimed author Aharon Appelfeld says, "I am still afraid that I might lose this language. Sometimes I wake up with the fear that my Hebrew, learned at great pains, would fade away and vanish. I want to catch it and I can't." From Language to Language was awarded the Best Film Prize at the DocAviv International Documentary Film Festival in 2004.

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