Blogerim

Interview with Alexis Hyman Wolff

Alexis Hyman Wolff in her exhibition Zur Zeit at the Museum der Dinge, Berlin, June 2013.
Photo courtesy of the artist.

One of the works in our art vending machine is a candle shaped like a root, made by the artist and curator Alexis Hyman Wolff. In this interview, she offers insight into the development of the work:

Christiane Bauer: Why did you make a candle for the art vending machine?
Alexis Hyman Wolff: Thinking about the small size of the objects and the temporary home they would find in the vending machine, I wanted to reflect on the idea of the souvenir, a central theme in museums. Candles are used for memorial in many cultures.  In Jewish tradition, a yortsayt candle is lit to remember a loved one on the anniversary of their death.

What is special about the material you used?
The candles are made out of beeswax from a beekeeping supplier in Berlin. I understand that beeswax is one of the few materials that burn without producing black smoke, which could explain the belief that burning beeswax candles is good for the air.  According to a European folk custom, when someone dies, a member of the family must go to the hive and “tell the bees,” and also invite them to the funeral. This tradition suggests a link between bees and the spirit world.

How important is the aspect of “remembrance” in your work? (more…)

On Blogerim

On this blog, we the staff of the Jewish Museum Berlin offer insights into our everyday and at times not so everyday work. As dedicated Blogerim (to use the Hebrew term for bloggers), we document for you such matters as how loans arrive at our door, how we ascertain details of their provenance or how we go about making videos for exhibition purposes. In the meantime, our ranks have swelled to some hundred bloggers who regularly invite you to take a peep behind the scenes and discover what makes the Jewish Museum so special. You will find in this blog series on temporary exhibitions, on Old Customs, New Rites and on  New German Stories, as well as one-off texts about the myriad of minor and major issues, questions and thoughts we have as we go about our daily tasks.

Our blog entries do not concern Jewish themes alone, however, but also touch on broader social developments and current affairs. We ask ourselves, and also you: Are we in Germany and Europe beginning to think of ourselves as a society of immigrants? Are you expecting a reprise of the circumcision debate from 2012? What does present-day Judaism look like in Germany? And what does it mean to live in Berlin – as an Israeli? Remarks on such issues are exchanged in passing, at the photocopier or over lunch—and occasionally also find their way into this blog.

This budding literary genre is, therefore, part canteen conversation, part feuilleton, part diary and part text message. Welcome to the blog of the Jewish Museum Berlin.

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The authors signing their book
© Jewish Museum Berlin

Alice Bota, Khuê Pham and Özlem Topçu recently presented their book “We, the New Germans: Who We Are and What We Want” at the Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin. The three women, all journalists for the newspaper Die Zeit, discussed with one hundred guests what it means to be German in the 21st century. Before the event we asked the three authors a number of questions, including: “What inspired you to write this book?” They responded:

“We three are colleagues. We are political editors. And we are children of foreigners. But we find that despite being quite different, we share an outrage at those who would like to tell us who we are. By writing this book, we wanted to voice our concern, claim our identities and share our families’ stories. We wanted to demonstrate that immigrants’ stories are not necessarily about failure, and that broken and mixed family histories can in fact lead to personal success.” (more…)