Artist's Floating Synagogue Destroyed By Venice Winds

(MENAFN- USA Art News) A floating synagogue installation, named Nabatele, which briefly served as an official collateral event of the Venice Biennale in August, was destroyed by extreme winds on September 17. The incident brought a temporary end to months of engineering and weather monitoring by the project's creator, architect Anna Kamyshan.

Kamyshan, who is based in London and New York, told The Art Newspaper on the day of the incident that the object was designed to withstand winds of 20 knots but was destroyed by winds reaching 50 knots. She shared closed-circuit footage on Instagram on Sunday, coinciding with the start of Yom Kippur, showing the wind deflating and tearing apart the synagogue, which had floated 35 meters above the lagoon.

“Perhaps it is not such a bad moment to let Nabatele go: to accept what I could not control, to forgive myself for what I could not prevent, and to begin again,” Kamyshan wrote in her Instagram post. She added,“There is something deeply Jewish in the possibility of continuing after destruction, not by pretending that nothing happened, but by carrying what happened with you and making something new.”

Kamyshan, originally from Lviv, Ukraine, a former center of Jewish culture, has also lived in Kharkiv, Moscow, and Kyiv. She co-created the conceptual vision for Kyiv's Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center from 2019 to 2021 and stated that navigating multiple identities has influenced her work.

The helium-filled, double-membrane structure was inspired by René Magritte's 1959 painting The Castle in the Pyrenees and was intended to symbolize both global uncertainty and hope, Kamyshan explained to The Art Newspaper in July. The name“Nabat” means“warning bell” or“alarm” in Yiddish, softened by the“-ele” suffix. The artist had expressed a desire for the project to“bring some light and some magic into these dark times” amidst“so many wars,” focusing on“the idea of an inner light present in every person” through the work's illuminated windows.

Curators Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks invited Kamyshan to develop the project for the ephemeral Yiddishland pavilion. According to Yiddishland's curatorial statement, Nabatele“enters into dialogue” with the history of the Venetian Ghetto, where Jewish life thrived despite a ban on street-level synagogues. The Montreal Jewish Museum sponsored the project, which also received support from private donors and foundations. Its construction involved experimental winches and gas cells, with assistance from rocket scientists.

Kamyshan noted in a Substack essay posted on September 11 that Nabatele had previously torn on July 16 while being moved for the opening ceremony, detailing numerous obstacles in the repair process. She wrote,“The original image has not changed: a synagogue floating above Venice. What has changed is everything I now now know about what it takes to make that image exist. An idea may be weightless. Making it real is not.”

Source: The Art Newspaper

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