Nostalgia

Benyamin Reich

The exhibition Nostalgia by Israeli artist Benyamin Reich builds bridges over the chasms separating an irretrievable past and European modernity. With the Holocaust, Orthodox Jewish life in Central Europe perished together with its austere world of ritual and mores. It was only when Jewish life began to flourish in Germany again in the 1990s that this most pious form of Judaism began to grow anew. The exhibition photographically documents this ‘second birth of Orthodoxy’ in concrete and abstract ways.
Using two levels of representation, Reich brings together the pre-war past of German Jewry and its modern counterpart – on the one hand in photographs representing Orthodoxy today, whether in the guise of objects or persons, and on the other in the form of nature-based reflection. In the latter, Nostalgia shows the manifestation of Jewish history in nature in both concrete and symbolic terms. Expressive landscapes steeped in history serve the artist as an expression and symbol of the Jewish past and present.