SATURDAY 11/11
PRAYER, an excerpt from IF I GIVE YOU MY SORROWS
Jo Kreiter
Apparatus Based Dance
We often hear the phrase “women in bed.” The phrase can conjure lurid sex, objectification, and misogyny. In this historic moment repressing women’s choices and bodies at the national level, I am reframing women’s beds as a place where our complexity and depth live. Where our bodies transform, grieve, and repair.
IF I GIVE YOU MY SORROWS focuses on the prison bed and engages three activists to explore what women experience in private. The project asks: How is your bed an antidote? What secrets do we leave in our beds? How do our beds hold what is messy, tragic, and grueling?
The excerpt performed this evening, called PRAYER, is danced by natalya shoaf, Sonsheree Giles and Jhia Jackson. Laura Ellis also contributed to the creation of the movement material. Music is by Carla Kihlstedt.
“Don’t let your mouth bring your flesh into guilt.” Ecclesiastes 5.5
*photo: jack Beutler
pictured: natalya shoaf, Sonshere Giles, Jhia Jackson
“Behold, it was good” (Genesis 1) refers to the good inclination; “And behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31) refers to the evil inclination. Can the evil inclination be very good!?
LABA Scholar Sam Shonkoff presents
“THE TABOO OF EVIL”
RELATIVITY
Lauren Schiller with Michael I Schiller
audio story
LABA fellow Lauren Schiller and her brother Michael I Schiller, both award-winning radio producers, present the world-premiere of their latest collaboration, “MONA.” Get a glimpse into the life of their great-aunt, a charismatic, powerful show-woman who built her life by breaking every rule. This is the third installment in their audio series, Relativity, in which they investigate the myths, legends and cultural significance of the stories they grew up with. Lauren and Michael will share the genesis of the series, play an excerpt of the episode, and probably demonstrate a little sibling ribbing.
“Return, rebellious children” (Hagiga 15a)
SUNDAY 11/12
THREE SHORT READINGS
ON MY TONGUE AND IN MY HAND: FRAGMENTS FROM THE FIRE Jennifer Kaufman
prose poems
These poems reimagine scenes from the Torah, scenes with Frankenstein, (an origin story in himself), and scenes where visual artists are grappling with their taboo impulses.
“You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth,” Exodus 20:4.
Advanced Camouflage Techniques for the Built Environment
Danielle Freiman
poetry
Danielle Freiman examines the deeply personal, tragic, mysterious, and sometimes humorous aspects of living with conditions that are chronic, invisible, and often undiagnosable or incurable. Through writing, illustration, and mixed media imagery in the form of a limited edition zine and enlarged wall text, she shares an intimate portrait of her experience in order to make these stories known and visible.
“What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be numbered.” —Ecclesiastes 1:15
ROSE MADDER LAKE
Amy Trachtenberg
prose poem
ROSE MADDER LAKE is a limited edition hand sewn chapbook. I took off from the aura of my great grandmother’s Transatlantic trajectory from Poland to Ellis Island with Sabbath candlesticks hidden inside her coat. The book was included in my piece, inspired by LABA, I have two names and at least two languages –for dreaming, my multi-part installation in Sobremesa, a group exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery earlier in 2023.
“And he said: what pledge shall I give thee?” And she said, thy signet and thy cord, and thy staff that is in thine hand; and came in unto her and she conceived by him.” Genesis Chapter 38-18
LABA Scholar Deena Aranoff presents
“ENTER PARADISE”
“Ben Azzai glimpsed and died.”
ART JEW
Peter L. Stein
documentary (work in progress)
I am deep into the development stage of a documentary feature called ART JEW. The film investigates the life and legacy of Alfred Flechtheim, a gay Jewish art dealer in pre-war Germany who discovered and championed the greatest avant-garde artists of his generation, yet who died in disgrace, persecuted by the Nazis as the (literal) face of “degenerate art.” In the film, aspects of his extraordinary story are revealed through the dramatization of letters, diaries and observations by Flechtheim and his contemporaries, performed by actors using both actual and imagined texts. The Art Jew team invites the LABA BAY and ICA+SF audience to attend an open workshop / performance of some of these texts on the evening November 12, which we are videotaping as a “proof of concept” for use in further script and project development.
“You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.” — Genesis 2:16
GALLERY WORK
DANIELLE FREIMAN
Advanced Camouflage Techniques for the Built Environment
paint marker on wall, printed zine
In Advanced Camouflage Techniques for the Built Environment, Danielle Freiman examines the deeply personal, tragic, mysterious, and sometimes humorous aspects of living with conditions that are chronic, invisible, and often undiagnosable or incurable. Through writing, illustration, and mixed media imagery in the form of a limited edition zine and enlarged wall text, she shares an intimate portrait of her experience in order to make these stories known and visible.
“What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be numbered.”—Ecclesiastes 1:15
MIA FEUER
Shemira (Stick On The Ice, Position, Dina, Joan)
concrete, wood, plexiglass, scagliola, pigments, silicon, polyurethane, steel, rabbit skin glue, garlic skins
Nested Sefirot
plexi-glass, wood, tape, gold leaf
Emanation Zones
plexi-glass, tape, wood, brass
Shemira explores my experience of becoming a hockey goalie, and how it led me to binah – the Kabbalistic emanation of “deep understanding.” This brutal and physically challenging position, this merciless male-dominated space, has become an arena of ecstatic spiritual healing and liberation.
I am the great, great granddaughter of a Ukrainian-born rabbi who left New York in 1901 to initiate an ill-fated Jewish Farm Colony in rural Saskatchewan. “Western Canada, land of storms, where Jewish intelligence is frozen in the depths,” he wrote. Three generations later, my father became the goaltender for the Winnipeg Jewish Men’s Hockey League. I never saw him pray, but I watched him take shots, block shots, fight, and be forced into submission. Was he, like me, tending to cycles of generational trauma? Discovering a wild connection to the divine?
Through the manipulation of intentional materials including the casting of my own body in polyurethane and garlic, Shemira explores internalized anti-semitism, misogyny, consent, gender, grief, violence, vulnerability and submission.
“In my mind this was not a simple summersault; something like an altar was glittering before me,” Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Paseczno.
FOREST REID
DREYDL: ZOL ZAYN MIT MAZEL
slot machine
Game Developer: Patrick Stefaniak
3D Artist: Sebastian Strunks
Voice Actor: Jeff Raz
Fabricator: Mitch Reid
Illustrator: Hannah Pozen
DREYDL: ZOL ZAYN MIT MAZEL is a Gematria slot machine; it speaks to the mystic, the gambler, and the Torah scholar. Beginning with a slot machine adaptation of dreydl, the interactive installation brings the player into the world of paylines and card counting combined with the Jewish mystical practice of alpha-numeric text interpretation.
Remember to cash out!
“The strange thoughts of today do not resemble the strange thoughts of tomorrow – this is evident to those who pay attention,” Ya’aqov Yosef of Polnoye.
AMY TRACHTENBERG
Everything is at least three things: the one you see, the one you think you know and the one you remember
silver-plated Sabbath candlesticks from Poland; human hair, soil and steel cart; wool coat with synthetic lining and linen on moving blanket; wood figure on textile; various pieces of clothing, plexiglass and found frame; chapbook
Each of these works draw on the poetics of cast-off materials, accidental incidents and indexes of human touch. The inversion of a worm-eaten wooden figure allows for its transformation and questions whether such a gesture is liberating or blasphemous. The unstitching and splaying of a woolen coat, the balling up and nominally preserved vestiges of hair lost, the revealing of the cavities of sliced Sabbath candles are records of actions that mine the pathos and transience of objects. The chapbook Rose Madder Lake took off from the aura of the Transatlantic trajectory of such candlesticks inside the coat of my great grandmother. Textiles, clothing, and color elicit emotion while their materiality and shapes entice memory. If the world itself can be my palette, the objects, collected, dismantled, and reconfigured contain multitudes.
“And he said: what pledge shall I give thee?” And she said, thy signet and thy cord, and thy staff that is in thine hand; and came in unto her and she conceived by him.” — Genesis Chapter 38.
LAURA TURBOW
Family Estrangement Begins At Home
photography on canvas and metal; plain pine box; image of grandma's needlepoint from the entryway of my parents' home in Iowa; my parents' words, transcribed from assorted phone calls; my mother's tablecloth; fiber; shattered glass; yahrzeit candle wax; kriah ribbon; cashmere; artist’s blood
"When we speak something once thought unspeakable, when we admit a devastating humiliation, we shrink the immensity of our shame to human scale, and the truth told finds its reflection in the eyes of the one who hears it and makes the choice to accept us as we are ... In the moment, the burden lifts, the window opens, and we are free," Letty Cottin Pogrebin, in her book Shanda.
Four images express a personal story of family estrangement. In chronological order, left to right, they are titled: "Shalom Bite," “Burning Down the House,” “Transformation” and "Equanimity in Motion."
“Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground.” — Genesis 4.
JENNIFER KAUFMAN
On My Tongue and in my Hand: Fragments from the Fire
In both text and image, my project considers taboos related to the act of making images or any likeness, speech and God's name as taboo, talking with the dead, and how silliness can be sacred.
Part I
In the Beginning, There is the Line
ink on paper
The drawing was made using ink-soaked noodles as a stylus or quill in my hand. The scroll of paper lay on the studio floor and was attached to the wall while I marked the paper with handfuls of noodles. My drawing is an image-less origin story built from a language of fragments, sacred intentions, and chance actions.
Part II
On My Tongue and in my Hand: Fragments from the Fire
prose poems
These poems reimagine scenes from the Torah, scenes with Frankenstein (an origin story in himself), and scenes where visual artists are grappling with their taboo impulses.
“You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth,” Exodus 20:4.
LILA GLENN RIMALOVSKI
Home-land
various materials foraged, found, and gifted from this bioregion; silver tableware from maternal great grandparents
In diaspora, what if the land is the temple, the soil the torah, and the table the central altar? What if diaspora is complete, fulfilled, and not oriented towards a longing for a distant, utopic, and imagined Jewish homeland?
Home-land sculpts Jewishness from relationship with the human and more-than-human beings of this bioregion, the ancestral lands of the Ohlone, Coast Miwok, Kashaya, and Southern Pomo people. Mirrored Shabbat tablescapes bring curiosity to the ways in which that land, ritual, and culture diverge and converge to create a localized Judaism, and concocting a messy reality that is both realized and disconnected.
This piece evokes the 19th century Yiddish concept of doykeit, meaning “hereness,” which posits that Jews can experience freedom wherever they are. This practice necessitates radical adaptation of ritual and culture in bioregionally specific ways and, in turn, requires deep solidarity with the human and more-than-human beings of place.
How might the very existence of rest (of Shabbat) rely on stewardship of the ecosystems we call home?
“This is Torah and I must learn.” Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 62a
LAUREN SCHILLLER w/ MICHAEL I SCHILLER
Relativity
archival photographs, audio recording
Four 1-minute audio excerpts paired with archival photos featuring several of the stories in Relativity, an audio series that investigates the truth behind family myths and legends.
Using archival tape and new interviews, award-winning radio producers and siblings Lauren Schiller and Michael I Schiller discover how their Ashkenazi immigrant relatives–and their descendents–shaped and pushed back against American culture; grappled with assimilation and tradition, identity and religion; and experienced fame, money, betrayal, inspiration, and love.
These audio excerpts are pulled from a series of 30 minute episodes, including “MONA” which was created during Lauren’s LABA fellowship. Hear more at therelativityshow.com.
“Return, rebellious children” — Hagiga 15a
BIOS:
DEENA ARANOFF
Deena Aranoff is the Faculty Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She teaches rabbinic literature, medieval patterns of Jewish thought, and the broader question of continuity and change in Jewish history. Her recent publications engage with the subject of childcare, maternity, and the making of Jewish culture.
MIA FEUER
Winnipeg-born Mia Feuer is a sculptor, associate professor of Sculpture at California College of the Arts, and mother to six year old Galileo. Her ancestors are Ashkenazi Jews who settled on the frozen Canadian Prairies of Saskatchewan five generations ago. She tends goal for the Northern California Women’s Hockey League as part of her sculptural and spiritual practice.
DANIELLE FREIMAN
Danielle Freiman is an interdisciplinary artist and designer based in San Francisco, CA. She received her B.F.A. from the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) at Massachusetts College of Art and Design with an emphasis in assemblage and installation. Her work is motivated by her personal experiences with mental health, chronic pain, queerness, and reproductive health, taking the form of zines (self-published books), printed materials, and workshops.
JENNIFER KAUFMAN
Jennifer H. Kaufman is an interdisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. She has exhibited work at White Columns in New York, d.e.n. Contemporary Art and Pharmaka Gallery in Los Angeles, the 808 Gallery at Boston University, and a number of Bay Area galleries. Rather than starting with an anticipated image, her work begins with a strong sense of sound and an internal cadence particular to the moment, an in-audible meeting that translates to motion and material: line as letter, tether to cord, tether to utter, cord to code.
JO KREITER
Jo Kreiter is a San Francisco-based choreographer and site artist with a background in political science. She makes large scale public art via apparatus-based dance. She engages physical innovation and the political conflicts we live within. Her work democratizes public space.
FOREST REID
Forest Reid is a Bay Area based sound designer, composer, and installation artist. His audio-visual work engages with Jewish mysticism, Yiddish culture, and repurposed archives. He has diverse experience with sound, including archival preservation, data sonification, and studio engineering. He has created installation work for the La Jolla Playhouse and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and has had his work featured in the Without Walls (WOW) festival in San Diego and Sukkahwood in New York.
LILA RIMALOVSKI
Lila Rimalovski is a multimodal creator facilitating connection between the more-than-human (ecologies, landscapes, spirit) and the human (body, mind, heart) through sacred place-making. Farmer and herbalist by training, artist by dream, and ritualist by new moon, Lila’s work attempts to stitch the body back to the land to affirm a sense of wonder, belonging, and deservedness of existence in this complicated place and time. Born on the west coast and raised by Northeastern maples, Lila currently makes home in queer Jewish community on Ohlone land in Oakland, CA.
LAUREN SCHILLER
Lauren Schiller is an award-winning interviewer and the creator of numerous podcasts and radio shows. Her new book, “It’s a Good Day to Change the World. Inspiration and Advice for a Feminist Future” came out Spring of ‘23 from Countryman Press.
SAM SHONKOFF
Sam Shonkoff is the Taube Family Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union. His scholarship focuses on themes of embodiment, revelation, and interpretation in modern Jewish spirituality.
PETER L. STEIN
Peter L. Stein is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning documentary maker and arts producer, creating nonfiction stories for television, theater, museums and online media. He served eight years as the Executive Director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and for the last nine years as Senior Programmer for Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival. He maintains an active career as an onstage interviewer, presenter and performer.
AMY TRACHTENBERG
Born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1955, Amy Trachtenberg’s work spans painting, sculpture and installation and includes design for theater, dance and public space. Her work has been shown and is held in the collections of The Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, The San Jose Museum of Art, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and The Haitian Embassy in Paris. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.
LAURA TURBOW
Laura Turbow has been a professional photographer for more than 25 years. She started as a newspaper photojournalist, working for publications including the Oakland Tribune and the Des Moines Register. She has run her own studio, Laura Turbow Photography, for two decades. Through an offshoot of her studio, a business called Still Life Stories, she helps people share their life stories through personal objects.