Exhibition Opening of Inside Out – Etgar Keret

Press Release, Wed 19 Oct 2022

Taking memories of his mother as his point of departure, the Israeli author Etgar Keret has written nine new short stories specifically for this exhibition, which will serve as their world premiere. With these short stories, Keret draws an explicit connection to the Jewish tradition of passing down memories from gene­ration to gene­ration. He recalls expe­riences he had with his mother, who was born in Poland in 1934, and recounts stories she told him as a child, inclu­ding ordinary anecdotes but also traumatic war­time expe­riences and encounters with violence. The narrative voice alter­nates between the perspective of an adult and that of a child. Keret makes no claim that these literary writings depict reality or paint a complete picture of his mother. On the contrary, he empha­sizes that such an attempt would be doomed to failure, and also wants the exhi­bition to illustrate the uncertain and frag­mentary nature of his memory.