Book launch: Joseph Sassoon Semah: On Friendship / (Collateral Damage) V – Between Graveyard and Museum’s Sphere

23 October 2024 – 20:00 h – Goethe-Institut Amsterdam, Herengracht 470

With Joseph Sassoon Semah, Linda Bouws (curator), Emile Schrijver (general director Jewish Cultural Quarter) and Rick Vercauteren (art historian)

The publication is in English; the book launch will take place in Dutch.

At first glance, a graveyard and a museum space seem to have little in common. Yet they both give meaning to Joseph Sassoon Semah’s artworks.

This fifth and final edition of Joseph Sassoon Semah’s ‘Magnum Opus’, featuring the artist’s artworks and texts, and text contributions by Linda Bouws, A.S. Bruckstein Çoruh / House of Taswir, Guus van Engelshoven, Arie Hartog, Gideon Ofrat, Jom Semah, Lisette Pelsers, David Sperber, Steve Austen, and Rick Vercauteren, marks the culmination of a profound multi-year art event that began in 2015.

Together with curator Linda Bouws, Sassoon Semah embarked on a mission to augment Western art history by filling its ‘empty page’ with the rich and diverse iconography of Jewish culture. It has been an amazing journey for the last ten years.

Joseph Sassoon Semah takes us on a wondrous journey of exploration. This journey extends from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, through the vanished public space (Jewish Quarter) of Baghdad, the waiting room of his Saba (grandfather) and the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, to the spatial architecture based on the typography of the Talmud Bavli.

The title of the publication ‘Between Graveyard and Museum’s Sphere’ alludes to life in Galut, the condition in which there is no motherland or physical cultural heritage to return to (personal graveyard), as well as the Western concept of museum, the institute that has already erased the knowledge of the layers of Jewish imagery/meaning that were adapted and used by the Western art production (universal graveyard).

Each of Sassoon Semah’s artworks serves as a witness to the profound loss, and at the same time reclaiming the lost world and making Jewish culture, symbols, tradition, and identity visible in a different cultural environment. He demands recognition and acknowledgement of the forced veiling of the knowledge of Judaism; in this way he is trying to liberate himself from his dis-placement. He offers an alternative reading about the role of museums and the authority of art history.

The first copy will be presented to Guus van Engelshoven, curator of the exhibition Between graveyard and museum atmosphere which took place in Museum Het Nieuwe Domein, Sittard (February – June 2024).

On this occasion, the publication will be offered at the special price of €32.50 instead of €39.95

For more information: https://www.metropool-projects.com/publicatie-on-friendship-v