Dreaming in English-the review
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We wanted to get there to the opening but the traffic in Tel Aviv was against us. Anti-Jerusalemites.
We missed the opening but at least we had a peek at the exhibition, and probably all too briefly. I’m referring to the photographic exhibition at The Diaspora Museum by Australian photographer Angela Lynkushka. It’s running til July 31 2007.
The exhibition is a collation of 3 photographic essays and its subject is a portrait of the Melbourne Jewish Community from 1989-2006. Naturally if you’re from Melbourne the draw of nostalgia alone ought to get you along there. But even if you’re not its worth shaking the sand out of your beach towels and having a bo peep.
Rushing through the exhibition as we did, one is likely to underestimate Lynkushka’s talent and mistake her sensitivity towards her subject for sentimentality. Lynkushka’s work, classified as social documentary photography, toes the line between art and documentation. Making her start in the 1970s when social awareness and activism were at their height Lynkushka has stayed true to her form. Over the years her subjects have ranged from artists and dancers to youth culture to aborigines and immigrants. These days her work seems to be running against the grain of fashion, where subjects are posed and photos doctored, touched up and altered. Her somewhat understated work is characterised by empathy for her subject and humility. With that it has been represented in the Australian National Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, amongst other places.
Lynkushka set out to document Jewish life in Melbourne in 1988. Til then Brunswick, a working class inner suburb where she lived among Greeks, Turks, Italians, Vietnamese, Lebanese and a handful of aging Jews who hung on there after most of their compatriots had moved out, had merely been her home. But the sale of the local shule in Brunswick catalysed her choice to document the Jewish community.
The exhibition in Ramat Aviv combines three parts, touching on migration, settling in and change from a Melbourne Jewish perspective.
The part dealing with change and continuity draws on work from the late 1980s in black and white and a series of colour portraits from 2006. There are the usual crop of artists, actors and professionals alongside the old style delis, grocers, tailors and shoemakers but they are juxtaposed against modern business people, political activists and intellectuals representing an integrated facet of the Jewish community in multicultural Melbourne.
Another essay in the collection is on Felix Tuszynski, holocaust survivor and expressionist artist and miniaturist.
The third essay takes an architectural turn, dealing with the old East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation shule. The congregation dates back to the gold rush days and their synagogue to 1877. By the 1960s most community members had deserted the inner suburbs but the old shule has seen a revival catering to members of the business community, students and tourists as well as a younger generation drawn to the inner suburbs. Lynkushka’s photos here highlight the colonial architecture, fashionable in that epoch and details like numbered pews and memorial boards.
Hope you enjoy it.
The exhibition is a collation of 3 photographic essays and its subject is a portrait of the Melbourne Jewish Community from 1989-2006. Naturally if you’re from Melbourne the draw of nostalgia alone ought to get you along there. But even if you’re not its worth shaking the sand out of your beach towels and having a bo peep.
Rushing through the exhibition as we did, one is likely to underestimate Lynkushka’s talent and mistake her sensitivity towards her subject for sentimentality. Lynkushka’s work, classified as social documentary photography, toes the line between art and documentation. Making her start in the 1970s when social awareness and activism were at their height Lynkushka has stayed true to her form. Over the years her subjects have ranged from artists and dancers to youth culture to aborigines and immigrants. These days her work seems to be running against the grain of fashion, where subjects are posed and photos doctored, touched up and altered. Her somewhat understated work is characterised by empathy for her subject and humility. With that it has been represented in the Australian National Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, amongst other places.
Lynkushka set out to document Jewish life in Melbourne in 1988. Til then Brunswick, a working class inner suburb where she lived among Greeks, Turks, Italians, Vietnamese, Lebanese and a handful of aging Jews who hung on there after most of their compatriots had moved out, had merely been her home. But the sale of the local shule in Brunswick catalysed her choice to document the Jewish community.
The exhibition in Ramat Aviv combines three parts, touching on migration, settling in and change from a Melbourne Jewish perspective.
The part dealing with change and continuity draws on work from the late 1980s in black and white and a series of colour portraits from 2006. There are the usual crop of artists, actors and professionals alongside the old style delis, grocers, tailors and shoemakers but they are juxtaposed against modern business people, political activists and intellectuals representing an integrated facet of the Jewish community in multicultural Melbourne.
Another essay in the collection is on Felix Tuszynski, holocaust survivor and expressionist artist and miniaturist.
The third essay takes an architectural turn, dealing with the old East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation shule. The congregation dates back to the gold rush days and their synagogue to 1877. By the 1960s most community members had deserted the inner suburbs but the old shule has seen a revival catering to members of the business community, students and tourists as well as a younger generation drawn to the inner suburbs. Lynkushka’s photos here highlight the colonial architecture, fashionable in that epoch and details like numbered pews and memorial boards.
Hope you enjoy it.
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