Yevgeniy Fiks is a Moscow-born New York-based artist, author, and organizer of art exhibitions. Among his projects are A Gift to Birobidzhan, Landscapes of the Jewish Autonomous Region, and Himl un erd (Yiddish Cosmos) that have been exhibited at 2B Galeria, Budapest; Galerie Sator, Paris; 21ST.PROJECTS/Critical Practices Inc., New York; and CCI Fabrica, Moscow. Fiks’s performance pieces Lily Golden, Harry Haywood, Langston Hughes, Yelena Khanga, Claude McKay, Paul Robeson, Robert Robinson on Soviet Jews and Red Kaddish have been performed at the International Print Center New York and the Museum at Eldridge Street/A Landmark Synagogue Story, both in New York. Fiks’s curatorial projects include The Wayland Rudd Collection at Winkelman Gallery, New York and First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe; In Edenia, a City of the Future at Yermilov Centre, Kharkiv, Ukraine (with Larissa Babij), and Monument to Cold War Victory at The Cooper Union, New York (with Stamatina Gregory). Fiks is the author of “Soviet Moscow's Yiddish-Gay Dictionary” (Cicada Press, 2016) and of the programmatic essay “Yiddish Contemporary Art” that has appeared in Yiddish, English, Russian, Hungarian, Belarusian, Polish, and Slovak.
Curators
Maria Veits is an independent curator and researcher. In her current and recent curatorial projects, Maria traces the ways of how manipulating information and rewriting history can be integrated in the processes of nation-building through the system of education, media, architecture and other social institutions and forms of statecraft. She explores artistic strategies of alternative knowledge production that also disclose the state mechanisms of constructing dominant, often suppressive, narratives.
Maria is a co-founder of TOK, a female curatorial collective and a nomadic platform based on principles of horizontality, collectivity, transdisciplinary exchange and knowledge-building. By initiating multilayered and durational projects that often take place outside of conventional art spaces, TOK infiltrates into various social structures in order to revisit the roles and powers of social institutions and reimagine their potential future.
Maria has curated exhibitions, residencies, symposiums, conferences, and publications. In the past few years she curated «Off to Space: Conternarrating the Cosmos» (Central for Digital Art, Holon, 2020) and co-curated «Get Real!» (Luda Gallery, St Petersburg, 2021, and Het Nieuwue Instituut, Rotterdam, 2022), «Voicing the silence» (CCI Fabrica, Moscow, 2021, apexart international open call winner 2020-2021) and «Intensive Places» (the main exhibition of the Tallinn Photomonth biennale, Tallinn, 2021).
Yiddishland Pavilion for her in an experiment and study of what an alternative to a nation state could be. In the situation of changing concept of citizenship and new forms of migration and (forced) nomadism, especially among artists, this project could be seen as an attempt to (re)create a fluid network state.
Maria is a co-founder of TOK, a female curatorial collective and a nomadic platform based on principles of horizontality, collectivity, transdisciplinary exchange and knowledge-building. By initiating multilayered and durational projects that often take place outside of conventional art spaces, TOK infiltrates into various social structures in order to revisit the roles and powers of social institutions and reimagine their potential future.
Maria has curated exhibitions, residencies, symposiums, conferences, and publications. In the past few years she curated «Off to Space: Conternarrating the Cosmos» (Central for Digital Art, Holon, 2020) and co-curated «Get Real!» (Luda Gallery, St Petersburg, 2021, and Het Nieuwue Instituut, Rotterdam, 2022), «Voicing the silence» (CCI Fabrica, Moscow, 2021, apexart international open call winner 2020-2021) and «Intensive Places» (the main exhibition of the Tallinn Photomonth biennale, Tallinn, 2021).
Yiddishland Pavilion for her in an experiment and study of what an alternative to a nation state could be. In the situation of changing concept of citizenship and new forms of migration and (forced) nomadism, especially among artists, this project could be seen as an attempt to (re)create a fluid network state.
Maria Veits
Yevgeniy Fiks
