The exhibition focuses on the embodied translation, interpretation, and the Jewish traditions of reading, where texts are approached not in search of a single meaning, but as sites of multiplicity—between the singular and the multiple. Texts are surrounded by commentary, contradictory interpretations, repetition, and return. Meaning emerges through this layered engagement, where difference is not resolved but held in relation. This logic resonates with Jewish textual traditions in which disagreement is not an obstacle to meaning but one of its conditions. Texts accumulate divergent interpretations that are preserved rather than reconciled. Authority depends not on consensus, but on the sustained presence of multiple voices—some of which remain in tension with one another, and some of which are not negotiable.

The exhibition will include works that engage with multilingualism, multiple translations, and layered interpretations — between Jewish languages (Yiddish, Ladino, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and others) and the languages of Jews’ non-Jewish neighbors (Germanic, Slavic, Romance, Semitic, and others). While each attempt at translation and interpretation strives for clarity and accuracy, their cumulative scope manifests a culture of plurality. Furthermore, the exhibition will not focus only on translation in a strictly linguistic textual sense, but rather on translation in a broader, expanded understanding of the term.

Arndt Beck work ikh bin nisht maksim | I disagree, 2025, is a part of a larger collective artistic research project initiated by Beck honors the Yiddish feminist and anarchist activist Milly Witkop (1877–1955). Beck’s multi-lingual mail art installation explores and reactivates the legacy of Witkop and connects the language(s) of the past and present – the clarity of the vernacular of turn-of the century anarchism to the dialects of the post-ideological present.

In Liliana Farber’s Songs for Rivers Silkscreen monoprints, 16 x 22 inch, 2024, Yiddish poems about rivers, found in Yizkor Books, are arranged to follow the shapes of the rivers they celebrate and printed as silkscreens using excess water. Farber offers an visual experiment of translation between a language and nature and matter, between letterforms and streams and tides.

Laila Abd Elrazaq’s Old-fashioned video work explores Arabic language's future within Palestinian and Israeli communities. Based on interviews with Arabic speakers from Christian, Muslim, Bedouin, Druze, and mixed backgrounds, the work presents conflicting perspectives, some fearing Arabic's decline as Hebrew and English dominate, others believing younger generations will preserve it.
Masha Shprayzer’s Wardrobe, 2025 installation of acrylic paint on textiles, uses vintage home textiles and old bedsheets, from which the artist hand-sewed nightgowns. On them, Shprayzer stenciled words, phrases, and fragments of recipes in Yiddish that she had found. This installation is about memory, loss, and attempts to preserve fragile traces through routine and the transmission of women’s experience translating across generations.

The exhibition will be accompanied  by a series of performances by choreographer and singer Eliana Pliskin Jacobs. Dancing between displacements / Tantsn tsvishn na un nad is a partially-improvised, site-specific series of interactions blending sound, movement and physical expression, language and public dialogue. Wearing an outfit inspired by traditional women’s clothing of the no-longer-existent shtetls of Yiddishland, the artist places herself in public space and interacts with public patterns of movement.