Audio walking tour - seventh artistic residency
During his creative stay in Warsaw (16 February – 8 March), Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay will create an artistic audio walking tour which visitors of the POLIN Museum will be able to borrow or download free of charge. The Canadian artist’s project inspired by a non-heteronormative short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer will be implemented in cooperation with the POLIN Choir and will be available from mid- March. Its prelude will be a meeting with the artist at the Museum headquarters on 5 March, at 6.00 p. m.
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay performs the art of video, sound and text. For quite a long time now, his creative activity has been dominated by musical culture and work with human voice as an artistic material. The artist pays particular attention to the issue of gender and attempts of categorising voices on the basis of gender. Also Jewish identity is a recurring motif in his works. His earlier artistic undertakings were based on knowledge acquired during his Yiddish studies in the 1990s.
During his artistic residency at the POLIN Museum, Nemerofsky will create a voice-based narration delivered through songs and verbal accounts inspired by Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story. It is a story of a boy who wanted to be a girl. The audio walking tour created by the artist will also include a story of an image of a mysterious plant capable of changing its gender. Thus, the artist - while working in contemporary Warsaw - will reflect upon the issue of gender identity and the way it had been referred to several decades ago. Nemerofsky will direct our attention to representations of identities other than heteronormative ones in history.
The project will be implemented in cooperation with the POLIN Choir conducted by Sean Palmer and Kuba Pałys who will be responsible for the soundtrack of Nemerofsky’s script. Those willing to obtain the audio-guide with the recorded audio walking tour will be able to borrow it at the Museum or download it free of charge.
The meeting with Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay will end his creative stay. It will be held on 5 March, at 6.00 p. m., at the Museum’s headquarters. The meeting will be hosted by Dariusz Brzostek, an academician from the Department of Cultural Studies of the Nicolas Copernicus University in Toruń. The POLIN Choir will also perform live a composition prepared especially for the audio walking tour. The meeting will be conducted in English and translated into Polish.
More about the artist.
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay is a graduate of the Concordia University (Montréal) and York University (Toronto). He won first Prize at the WRO 03 GLOBALICA 10th International Media Art Biennale in Wrocław as well as awards at other international festivals including the Lisbon Avanca Film Festival, Hamburg Short Film Festival and Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage.
This works have been exhibited in institutions including , the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), the Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt), the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art (Toronto), Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) as well as solo exhibitions at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (Kitchener), Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax), Dazibao Centre de Photographies Actuelles (Montreal), MuseumsQuartier (Vienna), Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen (Innsbruck), New Langton Arts (San Francisco).
More about the artist at www.nemerofsky.ca
More about artistic residences at the Museum at www.polin.pl/en/residencies
The activity “Open Museum – Education in Action” is carried out within the project “Jewish Cultural Heritage”, component “Faces of Diversity”. Supported from the Norway and EEA Grants by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.
www.eeagrants.org, www.norwaygrants.org
More about "Jewish Cultural Heritage" project