The Castle of Yiddishland
Anna Kamyshan
AI-generated video, 1:17
Inspired by René Magritte’s “The Castle of the Pyrenees”, the project by Anna Kamyshan echoes his vision of safekeeping in free suspension. Here, the Castle is a lost wooden synagogue—the spiritual and communal heart of Eastern European shtetls—drifting above the cities of today’s dispersed Yiddishland. Each synagogue’s architecture adapts to its surroundings, merging local forms with the memory of vanished Jewish spaces. The work reclaims airspace as territory, recalling how Jews in Venice were forbidden to build synagogues on the ground floor, raising them above the city. In perpetual flight, these synagogues evoke a homeland without land—resilient, adaptive, and borderless.
Illustration from the 1957 book "Wooden Synagogues" and the 1996 edition "Heaven's Gates: Wooden Synagogues".
René Magritte, The Castle of the Pyrenees, 1959, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Anna Kamyshan
Anna Kamyshan is a multidisciplinary curator, artist and architect.
From 2019 to 2021 Anna was a Director of Conceptual Development at Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv. Under her creative direction, a 100-year plan for the Babyn Yar territory was developed, focused around a number of installations and architectural interventions. Anna is the author of installation Glimpse into the Past dedicated to the oblivion of memory and opened by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky in January 2021. Anna was a member of the Architectural Advisory Board of the Babyn Yar Foundation.
Prior to her work in Kyiv, Anna curated the Moscow River project at the Meganom architectural practice in 2014-2019 and co-founded the grassroots public organisation Moscow River Friends. This initiative helped to build awareness about the long-lasting crisis of the river and the state’s role in exacerbating it. The exhibition resulting from the project won the Wax Bee prize at the 2019 Milan Triennial and was part of the Venice Biennale publication project Voices, awarded with a Special Mention.
In 2022 Anna co-founded Mriia, an initiative that aims to imagine the future of Ukraine in a long-term perspective. Currently she is a reserch fellow at Charles Jencks Foundation and The School of Advanced Study at UCL.
From 2019 to 2021 Anna was a Director of Conceptual Development at Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv. Under her creative direction, a 100-year plan for the Babyn Yar territory was developed, focused around a number of installations and architectural interventions. Anna is the author of installation Glimpse into the Past dedicated to the oblivion of memory and opened by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky in January 2021. Anna was a member of the Architectural Advisory Board of the Babyn Yar Foundation.
Prior to her work in Kyiv, Anna curated the Moscow River project at the Meganom architectural practice in 2014-2019 and co-founded the grassroots public organisation Moscow River Friends. This initiative helped to build awareness about the long-lasting crisis of the river and the state’s role in exacerbating it. The exhibition resulting from the project won the Wax Bee prize at the 2019 Milan Triennial and was part of the Venice Biennale publication project Voices, awarded with a Special Mention.
In 2022 Anna co-founded Mriia, an initiative that aims to imagine the future of Ukraine in a long-term perspective. Currently she is a reserch fellow at Charles Jencks Foundation and The School of Advanced Study at UCL.