FENTSTER

APRIL 25 - OCTOBER 26, 2024 | EXTENDED TO DECEMBER 7

OPENING SIDEWALK PARTY | JUNE 23 | 3 - 5 PM

An artistic ode to the general stores that sustained a family and the unlikely Jewish communities of northern Ontario

A new multi-media exhibition mines one family’s experiences and archival treasures to explore the little known story of Jewish life in the far north of Ontario. Toronto-based artist Meichen Waxer has been recuperating a relationship to the place where her family traces its roots in this country - the small Jewish community of Kirkland Lake. Beginning in the early 20th century, Jewish immigrants settled in pockets across northern Ontario and Quebec, fleeing increasing discrimination and persistent pogrom attacks in eastern Europe and the Russian Pale of Settlement. For the FENTSTER window gallery, Waxer creates an original installation informed by accounts in her late grandmother’s journals and inspired by the general goods store that her great-great-grandmother started in the north. I Will Relate to You came together much like the original store itself: pulling in friends, repurposing and borrowing objects. The installation is accompanied by a capsule history exhibition on the onetime Jewish communities around Kirkland Lake featuring images from the Ontario Jewish Archives.

To learn more about the Kirkland Lake Jewish Community and the installation, click here

Presented by FENTSTER and the Ontario Jewish Archives with the support of the Kultura Collective

Curatorial team | Donna Bernardo-Ceriz, Na'ama Freeman, Evelyn Tauben

Installation | Paul Boddum, Sal Lovink McKinnell, David Waldman

Embroidery team | Sam Mogelonsky, Hanna Schacter, Noah Gano, Ellen Bleiwas, Na'ama Freeman, Rachel Miller and Meichen Waxer

Acknowledgements

FENTSTER thanks Nick Blais and Erika Pulfer for their invaluable consultations on the exhibition.

The artist would like to thank her bubbie, Jessie as well as all the former residents of Kirkland Lake and their descendants who she has interviewed as part of a larger research project funded by the Canada Council for the Arts: Peter Waxer, Stephen Aidelbaum, Belle Kizell, Marc Gurevitch, Henry Abramson, Aliza Sanchez, Raphaela Abramson, Boaz Abramson, Aryeh Abramson, Ethel Abramson, Sol Mednick, Helen Winkler, Ann Leibovitch, Harvey Korman, Esther Verred, Isaac Katz, and Morris Langer. Others who made this journey possible and added love and care: Roxanne Luchak, Jon McCurley, Tanis Fink, Derek Liddington, Katherine Waxer, Orly Zebak and Howard Kizell.

Installation photos: Brittany Carmichael

TSVISHN (Yiddish for ‘between’) is a series of pop up projects in the window while we’re in between exhibitions.

ON VIEW NOW UNTIL APRIL 24, 2024

Toronto-based Ukrainian illustrator from Israel, Sasha Semidotski created a beautiful window drawing for FENTSTER. Oversized hands gently peel back the shutters of a window to a better future for all.

PREVIOUS POP UPS | FALL 2022

Created with Los Angeles-based artist Benny Ferdman at OCAD University, this work formed the body of a life-sized, kinetic elephant sculpture commissioned for the 2018 Ashkenaz Festival parade. For FENTSTER, these sculptural panels are exhibited in this form (independent of the elephant) for the first time.

Participating Artists | Jeremy Aranoff | Bea Aspiras | Louise Carson Suzanne Carson | Jennifer Fedun | Carolyn Howell | Yan Huang | Alanna Kibbe | Jonathan Rotsztain | Marsha Wineman | Shelley Yampolsky together with Yavni Bar-Yam, Avia Moore, David Waldman and many more.

The parade was a part of the WondeRing project at the Ashkenaz Festival produced by FENTSTER Curator Evelyn Tauben together with Creative Ways

A new, never before exhibited block printed fabric piece by Toronto artist Rochelle Rubinstein. Rubinstein is a printmaker, painter, fabric and book artist. Her work has been exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland; Yeshiva University Museum, New York; Print Triennial, Estonia; as well as McMaster Museum of Art, Royal Ontario Museum, and Chinese Cultural Centre, in Canada. For eighteen years, Rubinstein was a member of Loop Gallery, where she had regular solo exhibitions, and for seven years she curated monthly exhibitions at Mon Ton Window Gallery, in downtown Toronto, which was the precursor to FENTSTER. Rubinstein is also a steward of Bela Farm, in Hillsburgh, Ontario, where she is engaged in art, agriculture, and activism.

Keep watching the window and follow us on Instagram to see what’s next ‘tsvishn’ exhibitions.

JULY - NOVEMBER 2023

Fringes Exhibition Event | Sunday, October 29 | 3:30-5:30 PM | Learn More

In a new work, multidisciplinary artist, Mindy Stricke explores the unpredictable landscape of parenting a young teen. Fringes maps the celebration of the artist’s daughter, Noa, becoming a bat mitzvah. This milestone became an expedition for Stricke towards radical acceptance – of her daughter, and ultimately, of herself. The artist creates a wearable map in the form of an evocative tallit (a prayer shawl with fringes on each corner) as a gift for Noa, which marks her place in the city where she became a bat mitzvah and within her lineage. Montreal’s environs merge with a geography formed from images of Noa and relatives when they became b’nei mitzvah at age thirteen. The invented topography reflects the artist’s experience as a neurodivergent, queer, polyamorous Jewish woman gaining the courage to question inherited maps, and also trusting her children to discover their own paths. When a new route must be charted, those on the fringes lead the way.

Learn more about details in the map and then share your own Bat / Bar mitzvah photos and reflections on being thirteen.

Mindy Stricke is a multi-disciplinary artist mapping the relationship between authenticity and belonging. Through a participatory research process and forms including photography, audio, video, and interactive installations, she abstracts and transforms everyday objects, texts, and stories to reveal new perspectives of the landscapes of our lives. She investigates what it means to tell the truth about topics ranging from motherhood to grief to women’s sexual pleasure, and has exhibited and screened her work internationally. Most recently, her short film Melting Point has screened in two dozen festivals, winning awards including Best Experimental Short at the Orchid Lesbian Film Festival in Buenos Aires, and Best Erotic Short at the Peephole Film Festival in Guadalajara. A transplanted New Yorker now living in Canada, she is an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University.

With thanks to Sara Borer, Na’ama Freeman, Rabbi Moishe Steigmann / Own Your Judaism, Aaron Levy, and the Mile End Chavurah.

Photos: Morris Lum / Mindy Stricke

FEBRUARY 21 - JULY 11, 2023

ONLINE EVENT | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21 | 7 PM

Earth, artifacts, movement and memory come together to form this new installation created for FENTSTER by the artist duo and married couple, Adam W. McKinney and Daniel Banks, based in Fort Worth, Texas. This exhibition is an outgrowth of their film, dubbed “a genealogical dance journey,” directed by Banks with McKinney as dancer / choreographer. They traveled to the places where McKinney traces his roots and where he danced in this site-specific work: Ouidah, Benin; Kraków and Siedlanka, Poland; as well as cities, towns, fields and shores across Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, and Wisconsin. The installation is in dialogue with McKinney’s ancestor, the 16th century scholar, Rabbi Moshe Isserles, and his foundational work: HaMapah, Hebrew for both ‘tablecloth’ and ‘map’. The artists map the narrative of a Black, Jewish, Indigenous Queer man in the United States, who inherits a lineage of genocide, forced migration and oppression; cultures of vibrance, community and resilience; and a past teeming with loss and omissions. In a gesture of release and exaltation, McKinney offers an opening for each of us to dance our own maps into existence.

Presented by FENTSTER together with Prosserman JCC and DNAWORKS as part of a season of programming with the artists supported by Kultura Collective. Follow us here and on Instagram for program announcements.

APRIL 28 - SEPTEMBER 8, 2022

OUTDOOR OPENING EVENT | SUNDAY, JUNE 12 | 2:30 - 4:30 PM, Artist Remarks at 3:30 PM

Parchment is an installation of community collected parchment papers exploring the mark made by baking challah bread for Shabbat, leaving an imprint of memory. When the pandemic dashed Toronto artist Rob Shostak’s ambitions to host large Friday night gatherings, baking braided challah bread became a small gesture to enliven Shabbat dinners for two with his then-new partner. For FENTSTER, this intimate experience expanded into a collective effort during a period marked by separation. The artist gathered parchment papers from across the country and around the world leftover from the baking process. Usually discarded, these sheets bear unusual golden-brown markings, which reveal the distinctive underbelly of this Ashkenazi bread more typically celebrated for its artfully twisted exterior and a slightly sweet, fluffy interior.

Novices and food industry pros, rabbis and artists, Jews and Gentiles, the observant and secular, children and grandparents viewed these accidental prints as snowflakes, finger and footprints, even Rorschach tests. Each sheet is as unique as its baker while retaining a consistency and familiarity akin to the tradition itself, with the oven acting as the serendipitous darkroom “developing” images onto the page. The fleeting way time is marked by the weekly celebration of Shabbat (the seventh day of rest) is made visible in the parchment papers. Shostak explores the impermanence of memory and Shabbat rituals—candles, wine and bread are all consumed—as these flimsy pages become an archive of that which disappeared months ago.

Follow @ParchmentProject for more stories and photos behind the parchment prints.

Rob Shostak is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Canada, whose work navigates the intersection of place, memory, and time. Shostak’s work has been exhibited at The Gladstone Hotel, the Toronto waterfront, the Bentway, among others, and appeared in Architectural Record, Azure, Domus, The Toronto Star, BlogTO, CBC, CityTV among others. Alongside these professional accomplishments, he is known for dressing up in his own custom designs of Toronto landmarks for Halloween. This ongoing project is the true display of his love for Toronto, and his passion for city building and community. Shostak is a co-founder of (Studio(Venn)Studio) - a queer-led multidisciplinary arts collective with Dionisios Vriniotis.

FENTSTER thanks Lauren Schreiber-Sasaki, Sabrina Malach, Miles Nadal JCC, Shoresh, Museum of Jewish Montreal, bare market, Noah Gano, Chris Rouleau, and all those who graciously and enthusiastically baked for this exhibition:

Eliot Alfi, Jacque Altman, Laura Brandes, Kate Campbell, Vincent Chan, Gigi Cukier Sala, Loren Davidson, Sarah Deshaies, Paul Dotey, Natalie Dubovsaja, Ed Elkin, Katie Fotheringham, Allen Flaming, Kate Goetz, Ellen Greenspan, Shawn Hitchins, Dafna Joy, Britt Jursik, Gracy Kahn, Shari Kasman, Kayla Kaye, Donna Koffman, Noe Koffman, Jürgen Krauss, Rachel Lissner, Miriam Margles, Ilana Martinez, Max McQuinn, Corey Mintz, Alon Nashman, Janet Nezon, Josh Nezon, Lida Nosrati, Elena Polyak-Duke, Hannah Schifman, Lauren Schreiber Sasaki, Tyler Shaw, Rob Shostak, Eve-Lynn Stein, Bonnie Stern, Mindy Stricke, Aliya Tafber, Revital Weiss, Natalie Tarek, Evelyn Tauben, Ariana Tugg, Naomi W., Jason Wong, Shirley Wong, Rob Zimmer and Sharon.

Installation Photos: Morris Lum

NOVEMBER 22, 2021 - APRIL 23, 2022

An abstracted tree without roots hangs in the FENTSTER window gallery, its limbs and leaves composed of many double-sided drawings created by Yaara Eshet (Toronto) and Aya Rosen (Brooklyn), longtime transplants to North America from Israel. The exhibition features all new work by the two artists who know each other almost exclusively through their illustrations. For FENTSTER, they adapted a project unfolding over several years of exchanging sketchbooks through the mail, which become shared canvases. Despite barely speaking before collaborating on this exhibition, they have been engaged in an extended conversation by responding to each other’s drawings, cultivating a profound mutual understanding. One hundred pieces have travelled by post to form this installation, defying borders, lockdowns and distance. A rotating mobile displays Eshet and Rosen’s pictures (each painted one side of the page) where they grapple with the idea of home. The work reveals a disconnect from their place of birth and their homes of choice, reflective of a wider trope of transience and displacement found throughout the Torah and Jewish history. The show surfaces a mutual restlessness from being transplants from a place with different rhythms, sounds, scents, cultures, people and politics. Each image presents a surprise, a challenge, and an invitation to the other – sharing the desire to illustrate the fragile, fertile and sometimes foreign grounds upon which they traverse.

WATCH THE CBC ARTS MINI DOC ABOUT THE ARTISTS’ COLLABORATION HERE

Thank you to Ida Ferdman and David Waldman for their behind the scenes support on this exhibition.

Ya'ara Eshet was born in Israel. She studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and has illustrated for daily newspapers, magazines and literary publications as well as over 30 children, youth and adults books. Eshet worked with advertising agencies and design studios on various projects. She has show in numerous exhibitions in museums and galleries, in solo and group exhibitions and art fairs in Israel and Canada. Eshet has lived in Toronto since 2003 with her family and a variable number of cats.

Aya Rosen’s family lived in Israel for many generations, nobody knows exactly how many and everyone says a different number. But though she still feels very connected to Israel, she's been living in Brooklyn for the past 15 years. Before moving to the U.S., Rosen worked as a graphic designer in several ad agencies and branding firms. Since moving to the U.S., she illustrated several books, had her work exhibited in multiple group shows and two solo exhibitions. She works with her husband Ned, who is a fashion photographer. Rosen makes art in one form or another every day, and hangs out with her dogs, Ginger and Nutmeg.

Installation photos: Morris Lum

JUNE 3 - NOVEMBER 17 2021

A roving ritual for the year 2221

ONLINE EVENT | AUGUST 26, 3:45 PM | Click here for the multimedia online celebration held during the annual KlezKanada Summer Retreat.

New York-based artist and architect Daniel Toretsky invents a part-performance, part-ritual, part-sculpture for an imagined distant Jewish future in a dystopian North America. For FENTSTER, Toretsky designed a tower on wheels inspired by ornate havdalah spice boxes fashioned like medieval castles. The project’s backstory is informed by an undercurrent in the collective Jewish consciousness of romanticizing places from the past. A yearning persists to return, for example, to the mythologized pre-war Eastern European shtetl, the Moroccan mellah neighbourhoods of the 1800s, early 20th century in New York’s Lower East Side, Kensington Market in the 1930s or 16th century Safed. Toretsky asked a diverse group of North American Jewish artists how our current communities might be memorialized by future generations. He wove together their responses and translated them into whimsical three-dimensional drawings filling the mobile structure designed for a speculative future where Jews resume wandering due to economic and climate collapse that renders our cities unlivable. Toretsky conceives of our descendants climbing into a life-sized version of the tower each Saturday evening for a raucous performance of our present-day Jewish lives, re-enacting moments from the sacred to the ordinary.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Daniel Toretsky is an artist and architectural designer based in Brooklyn. His sculptures, built environments and urban interventions use participatory design to explore Jewish identity, diaspora, inequality and climate change. Raised in the Yiddish revival scene, Toretsky’s work is often informed by probing Ashkenazi Jewish rituals, heritage and history with humour and a spatial focus. Many of his projects embrace Jewish cultural and religious rituals, while interrogating structures of power within the Jewish diaspora. Toretsky is a graduate of the architecture department at Cornell University where he has also taught design. He currently designs museum exhibits at Studio Joseph, an architecture firm in New York. He also plays trombone in brass and klezmer bands, The Hungry March Band and Mrs. Toretsky’s Nightmare.

Presented together by FENTSTER and KlezKanada

FENTSTER thanks Jean-Christophe Foolchand and all who contributed reflections for the future in addition to Daniel Toretsky and Evelyn Tauben: Ari Lewis-Weigens, Giselle, Lillie Pearlman, Mark Rubin, Noah Guthman, Orly Zebak, Sara Yacobi-Harris, Sebastian Schulman, Sharoni Sibony, Zach Mayer and Zoe Aqua.

Installation photos by Morris Lum

JANUARY 25 - JUNE 1, 2021

A new, site-specific installation referencing the immigrant experience, environmental fragility, and resilience.

Artist Rachel Miller creates a textured, tapestry-like waxen assemblage taking inspiration from Jewish art traditions and speaking to the urgent need for ecological healing. The motifs in this sculptural work – composed of wax-cast forms – are extracted and enlarged from papercuts, a common form of Jewish ritual and folk art for hundreds of years. Miller researched paper artwork made around 1910 – the year her grandfather, then a young child, fled with his family to New York from Galicia. Despite the delicate, disposable material, the papercuts that inspired this project endured over a century, echoing the fragility and the durability of starting life over as an immigrant, as her relatives did, carrying little more than traditions and traumas.

The artist incorporated natural, reusable and repurposed materials, including drippings from Shabbat candles collected from across Toronto’s Jewish community. Her process reflects the continuity of the patterns, alluding to the cyclical rhythms of nature and life while acknowledging the imperative to adopt sustainable practices. The exhibition title – Between the Suns – derives from a Hebrew phrase in Jewish tradition referring to the transitional time of twilight. This exhibition harkens to our present-day limbo – between environmental degradation and the possibility for repair, between life during a pandemic and a new reality on the horizon, between the uncertainty of dusk and the rise of a promising day.

Presented as part of the DesignTO Festival | January 22 - 31, 2021

The distanced and digital DesignTO Festival transforms Toronto into a hub for creativity, taking art and design out of the studio and into the urban sphere, forming Toronto’s design week.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rachel Miller is an artist, educator, design consultant, and researcher from New York and based in Toronto. Through sculpture, installation, performance, and garment, Miller’s work explores environmental patterns and how they interconnect with our own patterns of growth, departure, and rejuvenation. Using both the body and landscape as subject and action, she coalesces topics from ritual, archaeology, architecture, travel, transformation, ecology, pattern, and nature. Her work examines the constant resurfacing of the past and its integration with the present. Miller received her MFA in Fiber from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and her BFA in Craft and Material Studies/ Fiber from the University of the Arts. She has taught textile design, fiber & material studies, and sustainable practices for over 16 years at Pratt Institute (NY), University of the Arts (PA), Fashion Institute of Technology (NY), Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, and National Institute of Design/ NID in India. She is currently Professor in the Textiles Department (after previously serving as Department Head) of the Craft and Design Program at Sheridan College (ON). Miller’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and can be found in private and public collections.

As we present an exhibition that highlights the need for personal and collective environmental responsibility, FENTSTER acknowledges that the Indigenous people of Tkaronto are the original stewards of this land. The path towards healing this land and living in harmony with it will require grounding in Indigenous knowledge.

FENTSTER thanks David Waldman, Canada Wax Corp., and all of our candle wax contributors: Irit Bretholz, Ruth Bretholz, Susanna Shankman, Lynne Heller, Jenny Lass, Diana Nuss, Ronni Rosenberg, Doreen Stegmuller, Sam Mogelonsky and Evelyn Tauben

The display surface was constructed from upcycled materials including a used table, surplus paint, and wood contributed by Building Up, a non-profit construction contractor.

Installation photos by Morris Lum

SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 - JANUARY 21, 2021

Please note that the exhibition will close at Noon on January 21.

ART & ARTISTS ON BEING BLACK & JEWISH | WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2 | FENTSTER artist Ella Cooper with Rebecca S’manga Frank, Sara Yacobi-Harris and Anthony Russell. Moderated by Kendell Pinkney. Learn more

SIDEWALK SOIREE | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13 | Get close to the art while remaining physically distant. Swing by and meet the artist from the sidewalk. Learn more

FENTSTER debuts never before exhibited work by Toronto-based photo-video artist Ella Cooper who uses movement and performance-based techniques in her work to explore identity and reclaim representations of Black bodies. The site-specific installation features a self-portrait series, presenting faces of grief and sorrow through the lens of a mixed race artist of Jewish heritage. The visceral and captivating photographs were created by Cooper’s performance of her inner emotional state, drawing on techniques of Butoh—a Japanese dance practice that she studied during an artist residency in Berlin. There she sought an embodied way to explore the feelings of loss, isolation and displacement evoked by being in a city marked by devastation and Jewish absence. Berlin stirred her formative experiences growing up in Montreal’s Jewish community, being raised within Jewish tradition while feeling outside it.

To make these images, the artist stepped out from the tumult of the city into the intimacy of one of the many outdoor photobooths across Berlin. The work – vulnerable and revealing – takes on additional layers of meaning presented in the highly public space of the FENTSTER window during the ongoing pandemic when many of us have passed months in seclusion, forced to face ourselves in unprecedented ways amidst a climate of racial unrest and heightened social inequalities. Refusing to be contained, a world of emotion comes to the surface in these photographs – reverberating with philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas’ assertion that, in its particularity and infinity, the human face “demands justice.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST

ELLA COOPER is an award-winning cultural leader, producer, facilitator, photo-video artist, educator and programmer based in Toronto. She has worked in the arts and culture sector for almost 20 years. Her creative work explores the diaspora, the creation of positive representations of the Black body in Canada, equity and arts for social change, community storytelling, contemporary dance and hybrid identity. Cooper is also the founder of Black Women Film! Canada, a collective and leadership initiative supporting the development of Black women filmmakers. She designs and facilitates transformative leadership, anti-oppression and arts empowerment programs for diverse communities, youth and non-profit organizations across Canada, the United States, Europe, the Caribbean and South Africa. Cooper holds a Masters of Education and has served as part time faculty at University of Toronto Scarborough. In addition, she continues to be a featured speaker and guest facilitator for national and international conferences. In 2019, Cooper was nominated for a Mayor’s Arts Cultural Leadership Award, and in 2017 was a Fellow in the Toronto Arts Council's Leaders Lab. Cooper’s work has been presented in galleries, public spaces and festivals in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amsterdam and Berlin.

FENTSTER gratefully acknowledges Smokestack Studio for generously printing the photographs in the exhibition.

Documentation images: Morris Lum

APRIL 26 - SEPTEMBER 21, 2020

ONLINE OPENING EVENT | MONDAY, MAY 18 | 7 - 8 PM

Watch the opening event here. The artist is joined by FENTSTER curator Evelyn Tauben and Yiddish singer Sarah Gordon in a multi-disciplinary program hosted by distinguished international curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

A recreated stained glass window honours familial and artistic lineages.

Toronto artist Robert Davidovitz creates a stained glass sculpture as an homage to his roots in Vilna and to the fragile material that buttressed his family for generations. For this original work made for the FENTSTER window gallery, the artist embraces a family practice that began with his grandfather, Motel who repaired broken windows in post-war Vilna to support his young family and then continued with his father Meir who in turn opened a window business upon immigrating to Israel in the 70s, often restoring synagogue stained glass. Windows were again the family’s entré into a new life after moving to Canada.

In his father’s workshop, Davidovitz fashioned his glass installation, informed by a 1935 painting Marc Chagall made upon visiting the private Vilna synagogue of an influential 18th century Rabbi known as the Gaon (genius) of Vilna. Intertwining personal and collective memory, Davidovitz reinterpreted the colourful windows seen in Chagall’s canvas of the synagogue that was later destroyed during the war. Cracked panes remind us how brokenness is a part of life, undeniable at a time when our existence feels shattered. The exhibition title comes from a Yiddish poem by noted Vilna writer Avrom Sutzkever (1913-2010), resonating with the exhibition and with this moment when the globe seems fractured at a scale not seen since the Second World War. What will remain of life before? What will remain of the devastation? What will remain through our memory, legacy, and connections with each other?

Robert Davidovitz is an Israeli born, Toronto-based artist. He received his B.A. in Visual Arts from York University. Best known for his “Woven Paint” series, his work has been exhibited in public galleries and museums including Durham Art Gallery, Thames Art Gallery, Harbourfront Centre, and most recently at Museum London. Davidovitz has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council, and has been featured in various publications and press including the Huffington Post, Moco Loco, and Bizarre Beyond Belief.

Lighting Design: Nick Blais

Photos by Morris Lum

Visitors are requested to maintain physical distancing precautions at all times.

FENTSTER would like to acknowledge Shlomo Davidovitz, MD Doors, Ida Ferdman and Jordy Koffman.

OCTOBER 29, 2019 - MARCH 1, 2020

EXTENDED INTO APRIL 2020 DUE TO COVID-19

OPENING RECEPTION + ARTIST TALK | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29 | 7:30 PM

The artist duo behind the internationally successful Warsaw-based Judaica company MI POLIN create a new site-specific art installation for the FENTSTER window gallery in downtown Toronto. This exhibition extends Helena Czernek and Aleksander Prugar’s deep interest in the Jewish ritual object, the mezuzah, which is traditionally affixed to the doorways of Jewish homes. Creating a window in the shape of large-scale mezuzah within the gallery’s front window (“okno” in Polish), the artists offer an unexpected view to a place that Jews called home for generations, thereby highlighting the crucial role of the mezuzah as a marker of home and of Poland within the span of Jewish history. Visitors will be able to peak into the window space get a vantage point of contemporary Poland in living colour and great beauty, despite the deep scars of the past. The exhibition pushes past stereotypical images locked into the Jewish imagination of a country cast in black and white with mud-packed lanes filled with peddlers and fiddlers on rooftops to a modern place that a flourishing Jewish community calls home today.

Mezuzah Okno is presented as part of MI POLIN in Toronto. For complete event listings, please click here.

On the Doorposts: Making New Jewish Art from Traces of a Jewish Past in Poland, an exhibition about MI POLIN’s mezuzah traces project is on view at the Miles Nadal JCC, October 31 – November 27, 2019

Presented by FENTSTER, The Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre and the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre as part of Neuberger Holocaust Education Week. 

This exhibition was made possible by the Kultura Collective of UJA Federation of Greater Toronto.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Founded in 2014 by Helena Czernek and Aleksander Prugar, MI POLIN (Hebrew for “From Poland”) is the first Judaica company in Poland since World War II. Czernek is an accomplished artist and graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and Hebrew Studies, Warsaw University. Prugar is an award-winning photojournalist and graduate of Warsaw University as well as of the prestigious film school at the National Film School in Łódź. Prugar also studied Management at Warsaw School of Economics. Mi Polin’s original Jewish ritual objects are found in the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum in New York and are carried by the most prominent Jewish museums internationally. Mi Polin was commissioned by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw to create a commemorative project for the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. They designed a yellow paper daffodil badge that is now distributed annually across the country to over 60,000 people to mark the commemoration. The creative duo is deeply involved in Jewish education and outreach initiatives in Poland and abroad exploring subjects ranging from Jewish arts and culture to Jewish life in Poland today. They recently received a grant from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland to develop educational programs in Polish public schools related to their signature project creating mezuzot out of imprints of mezuzah traces still found in doorways across Poland. In 2019, Czernek and Prugar established a foundation to preserve the last physical remnants of the Warsaw Uprising and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Fall 2019, they will be in Toronto from Warsaw for an artist-residency including the inaugural presentation of original exhibitions at the FENTSTER window gallery and the Miles Nadal JCC presented together with Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre.

Exhibition documentation by Morris Lum

JULY 18 – OCTOBER 24, 2019

A window into Jewish Poland through a surreal forest

A new site-specific installation created for the FENTSTER window gallery features the work of architectural photographer David Kaufman. An enlarged image of a leaf tapestry of vines fills FENTSTER’s window entirely, offering a view into a distant scene. Close inspection reveals mounds and towers within this lush carpet of greenery. Lying beneath are tombstones. This photograph of a 200-year old Jewish cemetery in Krakow is part of Kaufman’s extensive project documenting Jewish cemeteries and sites across Poland and western Ukraine. He captures the unexpected beauty of these landscapes and the intricate craftsmanship of carved tombstones. Before the deep fissure caused by World War II, Poland was a dynamic centre of Jewish life for over 1,000 years. Rather than perceiving cemeteries as markers of loss, Kaufman sees them as “gardens of memory,” inspiring monuments to a culturally, religiously and politically diverse civilization to which roughly eighty percent of Canadian Jewry can trace their roots. Discover through the photographer’s eyes, the serenity and splendour of these places, that reflect the spectrum of Jewish life that existed before, during and after the Holocaust as well as the tension between man-made ritual and the persistence of nature. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.

Exhibition and installation photos by David Kaufman

FEBRUARY 19 - JUNE 9, 2019

OPENING RECEPTION | THURSDAY, MARCH 7 | 7 - 9 PM

FENTSTER presents the first solo exhibition by Toronto cartoonist Jonathan Rotsztain. An extension of the artist’s “Self-Loving Jew” comics series, the show features his deceptively playful drawings with a cartoonish portrait of a conflicted, anxious yet optimistic thirty-something Jew. All new work in this site-specific diorama makes visible how family, community and social context can unconsciously shape one’s patterns of behaviour and thinking. Rotsztain shows how he inherited fears and successes, guilt and joys, neuroses and values not only from what was articulated to him but also from what went unspoken and unacknowledged. This experience can be understood like the wallpaper in the family home; we become so accustomed to seeing it that we stop noticing it entirely. Through an introspective process, Rotsztain began to see his own “wallpaper.” For the exhibition, he transforms behavioural patterns into decorative patterns that adorn domestic settings. The artist-designed wallpaper on display is dense with images of Holocaust​ ​fueled fears, intergenerational trauma, and an inner struggle to reconcile a progressive, secular worldview with common narratives about Jewish life.

Jonathan Rotsztain is a writer, cartoonist and graphic designer based in Toronto. His autobiographical comics work deals with issues of class, identity and self-esteem, using illustration's power to conjure the fantastic. A graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies with an MFA in Cartooning, Rotsztain’s comics have been published in Carte Blanche, The Dominion and Seven Days Vermont. He produced comics for Noah Richler's 2015 federal election campaign, which appear in the memoir "The Candidate" (Penguin Random House, 2016). Rotsztain wrote, designed and curated a graphic tribute to Art Spiegelman with the Koffler Centre of the Arts. He illustrated theatre artist Michael Rubenfeld's graphic memoir "Motherland" (2016, in English and Polish). Rotsztain's comics about being a Metro newspaper promoter are collected in the graphic novel "Searching for Paperman", which was profiled on Canadaland's Imposter podcast. He is the creator of “Self-Loving Jew”, a series of visual essays exploring a secular, cultural Jewish identity. The series has appeared on Koffler.Digital, New York’s The Forward, the Bunz blog and the Canadian Jewish News. His original comic about the Toronto Islands is part of Lake Effect Projects "Gateways" group exhibition.

Photos by Morris Lum

NOVEMBER 12, 2018 - FEBRUARY 12, 2019

OPENING EVENT: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20 | 7 - 9 PM

Collaged photographs and drawings that mine childhood memories and reflect the volatility of nature, community and identity.

Multi-disciplinary artist Lynne Heller creates an original, layered installation for FENTSTER. The exhibition draws upon recollections from her childhood at Camp Naivelt (Yiddish for “New World”), a summertime family retreat in Brampton focused on secularist, socialist values, activism, and a celebration of Jewish and Yiddish culture. This haven of radical politics was the centre of Heller’s Jewish community as she was raised in a gentile area of Toronto where her Jewish background set her apart. As the child of a Jewish father and an Anglo-Protestant mother, Heller felt a sense of displacement in many settings. This experience of dislocation is explored in the installation through a poignant early memory of visiting Naivelt in the spring off-season to find the property covered with enormous ice floes ejected from the thawing Credit River that runs through the camp. The massive ice blocks appeared both organic and oddly unnatural. Similarly, Heller felt both integrated into the Naivelt community during the 1960s and 70s and also felt different in that milieu given her mixed heritage. Combining original photographs, drawings and renderings of that eerie frozen terrain, large-scale pictures hold out the promise of a new world, one that bridges seemingly distinct realms.

Lynne Heller is a post-disciplinary artist, designer, educator and academic. Her interests encompass material culture, new media performative interaction, graphic novels and sculptural installation. Heller completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2004 and her PhD in 2016 at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her research was practice-based, with a specialty in Digital Media Arts and Feminist Studies.  She is an Adjunct Professor at OCAD University and an Associate Member of the Graduate Faculty. Heller is co-director of the Data Materialization Lab at OCAD University. She is also an adjunct faculty member of SMARTlab, Ireland. Heller has an extensive exhibition record both nationally and internationally and is the recipient of grants from the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Canada.

Photos: Morris Lum

MAY 28 - OCTOBER 4, 2018

EXTENDED THROUGH OCTOBER 2018

OPENING EVENT: JUNE 12 | 7 - 9 PM

Inverting the renowned Jewish exorcism story of The Dybbuk, painted and sculpted figures stitch protective layers onto their own skin.

Multidisciplinary artist Jess Riva Cooper has a long-held interest in mystical characters of Jewish folklore. The notion of the evil spirit of the Dybbuk which enters a living person intertwines with Cooper’s ongoing exploration of parasitic, invading plant life. Noted writer and ethnographer S. An-ski (1863–1920) popularized the lore of the malevolent spirit in the renowned early 20th century Yiddish play: Der dibek: Tsvishn tsvey veltn (“The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds”). The story centres on Leah – possessed on her wedding day by the tortured, wronged soul of her true beloved, Khonen, who died suddenly upon learning of her impending matrimony to another. 

In this exhibition, the artist interprets the famed fantastical tale through a woman’s view, considering how Leah does not possess control over her destiny within a devout, patriarchal world order. The exhibition title is extracted from a climactic moment in the script; the Rabbi commands the Dybbuk to sever “every thread that binds you to the living world and to the body and soul of the maiden." The world An-ski describes demands separation; cutting from the unknown. ​Integrating large-scale drawings and ceramic sculptures, Cooper takes up the metaphor of connective threads in a generative way. She transforms women’s idealized domestic work of sewing and mending into an otherworldly gesture equal to An-ski’s drama. Sewers stitch protective garments onto their clothing and even their own skin, attaching to themselves benevolent shadow-beings that only appear foreboding. Here the act of creation is one of salvation, returning power to the hands of women.

Presented together with the Ashkenaz Festival

The opening event will feature a live performance by award-winning theatre artist Alon Nashman presenting the Dybbuk scene from his original one-man show, Hirsch. Click here for details.

Jess Riva Cooper is an artist and educator based in Toronto, integrating colour, drawing, and clay to create sculptures and installation-based artworks. She received her MFA in Ceramic Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. Cooper exhibits her work throughout Europe and North America and has participated in numerous artist residencies such as Brandeis University, Lillstreet Arts Center, Medalta, The Archie Bray Foundation, and The Kohler Arts/Industry Program. Cooper currently teaches at Sheridan College in the Bachelor of Craft and Design Program in Oakville.

PHOTOS BY MORRIS LUM

FEBRUARY 26 - MAY 26, 2018

OPENING EVENT | THURSDAY, MARCH 15, 7 - 9 PM

In a striking new neon light installation for the FENTSTER window gallery, Toronto-based and Beijing-born multidisciplinary artist Shellie Zhang reimagines marquee signage to represent two significant cultural institutions established by Chinese and Jewish newcomers to Toronto. Zhang was invited to mine the extensive holdings of the Ontario Jewish Archives, Blankenstein Family Heritage Centre (OJA) for intersections between Jewish and Chinese histories in Toronto. Her research at the OJA led to the building on the north-east corner of Dundas and Spadina that functioned as a cultural destination for both communities. First known as the Standard Theatre, the venue opened as a Yiddish theatre in 1922 and five decades later hosted Chinese cinema as the Golden Harvest Theatre.

The artist considers how one building served as a locus for cultural expression and cohesion for two different communities. Separated by decades but both operating in their native languages, the venues fostered and celebrated these distinctive cultural identities whereas the aesthetics each theatre adopted – revealed in Zhang’s neon sculpture – reflect an impulse to keep pace with the latest mainstream trends. Accompanied by historic information detailing over 75 years of the building’s continuous operation together with reproductions of archival materials, the exhibition surfaces immigrant narratives embedded in the architecture of the Kensington Market-Chinatown neighbourhood, revealing little-known points of connection and breaking down siloed conversations about our city’s past.

Click here for related public programs

Curated by Donna Bernardo-Ceriz, Dara Solomon and Evelyn Tauben

Presented by FENTSTER and the Ontario Jewish Archives, Blankenstein Family Heritage Centre. Featured in Myseum Intersections, an annual festival of exhibitions and events showcasing different perspectives on the city's natural, cultural, and historic diversity

FENTSTER and OJA would like to acknowledge Arlene Chan, Miriam Borden and Colin Geddes for their contributions to the research for this exhibition and related public programs.

Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Canada. She has exhibited at venues including WORKJAM (Beijing), Scope Art Fair (Switzerland) and Public House of Art (Netherlands). She is a recipient of grants such as the RBC Museum Emerging Professional Grant, the Toronto Arts Council’s Visual Projects grant, and the Canada Council’s Project Grant to Visual Artists. Recent projects include a residency at the Art Gallery of Ontario with EMILIA-AMALIA, the 2017 Creative Time Summit, and an ongoing yearlong peer mentorship program with Whippersnapper Gallery. 

By uniting both past and present iconography with the techniques of mass communication, language and sign, Zhang’s work deconstructs notions of tradition, gender, identity, the diaspora, and popular culture while calling attention to these subjects in the context and construction of a multicultural society. She is interested in exploring how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, how this relates to lived experiences, and how culture is learned and relearned.

Installation photos by Morris Lum

NOVEMBER 24, 2017 - FEBRUARY 22, 2018

OPENING EVENT | Tuesday, December 5 | 7 – 9 PM

Bernice Eisenstein opens the pages of her meditation on language, books and memory in a new site-specific installation for FENTSTER. A long table is laid with an assortment of open books, each intricately manipulated and embellished by the artist who folds, paints, scribes and reinvents the pages of works by the likes of Albert Camus, Stefan Zweig and Robert Walser. Their poetic, philosophical writings are transformed into musings on “nothing and all,” a phrase drawn from a poem by Mark Strand. Based on a wedding photograph of the artist’s family taken on the cusp of the Second World War, a large painted group portrait hangs in the window. Lost and unknown ancestors are audience to both this eclectic library and passersby on College Street. The painting and the exhibition as a whole become a palimpsest – an entirely new, pulsating creation revealing traces of what came before.

Bernice Eisenstein is a Toronto-based author and artist. Her award-winning graphic memoir I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006) has been translated into ten languages and was adapted into a National Film Board animated short, which was voted among Canada’s Top Ten Short films of 2010 by the Toronto International Film Festival. She also created Correspondences (2013) with celebrated novelist and poet Anne Michaels. Eisenstein’s art has been featured in exhibitions throughout Canada, Europe, and the United States. Most recently, her installation Genizot was presented in a solo exhibition (2015) at the Royal Ontario Museum as well as in the international group exhibition From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art (2017) at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. The solo show Portraits of Memory appeared at Yeshiva University Museum in 2016.

PHOTOS by Lisa Logan (unless otherwise noted)

MAY 25 - AUGUST 29, 2017

EXTENDED THROUGH OCTOBER 2017

OPENING EVENT: JUNE 7 | 7 - 9 PM

I saw the land and it was unformed and void; and to the skies and they had no light. I saw the mountains and they were quaking and all the hills shook. I saw and there was not a man and all the birds of the sky fled. I saw, and the grove was a desert. And all its cities were demolished in the face of the Lord, in the face of his anger. For so says the Lord: All the land shall be desolate but I will not make an end.

Jeremiah 4:23–27

Four gilt Hebrew letters on four blackened airplane doors spell out the word “ha’aretz” meaning “the land.” The word and the installation relate to the artist’s ongoing interest in a particular passage from the biblical book Jeremiah in which the doomsayer prophet echoes language from the book of creation: Breishit. In Genesis there is light, but Jeremiah sees darkness. Instead of vegetation and fruit trees, Jeremiah sees a desert. Where Genesis describes the creation of people, living creatures and birds flying over the land, Jeremiah sees a barren landscape on the brink of destruction.

Throughout his portfolio on this biblical text, Simon Glass considers the way in which Jeremiah’s mirroring of Breishit is refracted in contemporary reality. Degradation of the land, extinction of animals and needless loss of life are caused by comparable manmade devastation that fuels the prophet’s preaching. Yet in transcribing “ha’aretz” onto the salvaged scrap yard doors of a civilian aircraft, Glass suggests taking a bird’s-eye view of the scarred land. Seeing ha-aretz from above, defects become distant and borders blur, offering the potential for healing that Jeremiah longed for.

Opening event will featured Jeremiah-inspired poetry readings. Click here for details.

Photos by Simon Glass

Simon Glass is an artist and educator based in Toronto. In his artistic practice, archival and original photographic imagery is combined with mystical, biblical and liturgical Hebrew. Recently, his work has gravitated toward installation and examines prophecy in the context of the possibilities and impossibilities of translation, the philosophy of language and the conflation of future and past. Glass graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1983 where he trained as a photographer and visual artist. He completed an M.A. in Media and Communication at the European Graduate School in 2005. Glass’ work has been exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions throughout Canada and internationally. He is the recipient of numerous awards from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Glass is an Associate Professor at OCAD University where he teaches photography and cross-disciplinary art. His project “The Ten Commandments/Prohibited Weapons” will be on view at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton from August 17 to December 2 with an opening reception on September 14. 

FEBRUARY 23 – MAY 24, 2017

OPENING EVENT | Wednesday, March 8 | 7 – 9 PM | FREE

Muslim and Jewish women explore menstruation, breastfeeding and mourning through writing, art and traditional texts.

Last year, a group of Jewish and Muslim women artists met regularly to study texts from their respective traditions, sharing how their heritage informs their artistic output. This collective was convened by the grassroots Shema & Iqra': The Jewish-Muslim Text Project, which brings together Muslims and Jews using religious texts as a springboard for dialogue. Called Blood, Milk and Tears, the initial project explored each traditions’ response to menstruation, breastfeeding and mourning, considering connections between gender, creativity, religiosity and identity.

FENTSTER invited the Blood, Milk and Tears Collective to make new work reflecting on their personal experiences and the religious practices that often marginalize them as women. The process began with further text study and by sharing stories with the creation workshops facilitated by noted printmaker, painter, fabric and book artist Rochelle Rubinstein. The result is a dense assemblage in the window gallery of long paper scrolls interpreted in inventive ways by a diverse, inter-generational group of women drawing upon a range of media including painting, print-making, collage, drawing, textiles and original poetry written in Arabic, English and Hebrew. Many scrolls incorporate textual sources from the Quran, the Hebrew Bible, Jewish prayer as well as Sufi mysticism.

The project features collaborations between longtime neighbours and new friends, several mother-daughter duos as well as students and scholars. Whether practicing or secular, each woman's relationship to her cultural and religious heritage encourages thoughtful reflection on her place within that tradition and on the significance of our blood, milk, and tears.
 

Participating Artists | Asma Ali | Fredelle Brief | Siham Chowdhury | Caryn Joy Colman | Karen Gold | Maysa Haque | Alisha Kaplan | Sarah Katz | Sharon Katz | Sara Abdel-Latif | Hannah Mayne | Tiferet Nashman | Sumaira Naz | Nilofar Noor | Rula Kahil | Kanwal Rahim | Sharon Ross | Rochelle Rubinstein | Shlomit Segal | Manaal Syed | Soheila Zarrabi

Developed by Evelyn Tauben, Shari Golberg and Rochelle Rubinstein

OPENING EVENT | Wednesday, March 8 | 7 – 9 PM | FREE

Join us for the launch of the new FENTSTER installation on International Women's Day and meet the Muslim and Jewish women who created artwork for Blood, Milk and Tears. The evening will feature vocalist Aviva Chernick and poet Sheniz Janmohamed sharing a new collaboration – two women exploring their relationship to their spiritual and creative practices through movement, sound and ritual.

Presented by FENTSTER and Shema & Iqra’: The Jewish-Muslim Text Project as part of Myseum Intersections

Community Partners:  Noor Cultural Centre, University of Toronto Multi-Faith Centre, Makom: Creative Downtown Judaism  and Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto

Curatorial decisions were solely made by FENTSTER and the leadership team involved in Blood, Milk and Tears.

Myseum Intersections is an annual festival of exhibitions and events showcasing different perspectives of the city's natural, cultural, and historic diversity.

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR

Rochelle Rubinstein is a Toronto-based printmaker, painter, fabric and book artist. In Toronto, she is represented by Loop Gallery, where her solo exhibitions are held regularly. Her work has been exhibited in such diverse places as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland; Yeshiva University Museum, New York; Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan; and McMaster Museum of Art, Canada. Rubinstein's work can be found in public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. As a community arts facilitator, her workshops and projects involving groups such as health workers, battered women, people with eating disorders, seniors with depression, and youth at risk, are based upon methods that are central to her or art practice: drawing, printmaking, sewing and bookmaking. www.rochellerubinstein.com

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Asma Ali is in her first year of a Masters of Pastoral Studies at Emmanuel College. She working towards being a spiritual care giver and psychotherapist. She appreciates the opportunity to work with and get to know the Jewish community and women who share her love for poetry and art. Asma is grateful for to FENTSTER and to all the organizers.

Fredelle Brief is a Jewish artist, active in her own community and in interfaith dialogue. She has worked professionally as a social worker, an environmental planner and a television executive (Director, Multifaith Programming, Vision TV). Her passion for peace building has animated her work in the volunteer sector. Fredelle received the Canada Peace Medallion from the YMCA for her work in interfaith dialogue and peace building. 

Siham Chowdhury is a Bellydancer based in Toronto. She is the founder of Dance Sister Dance, a fusion bellydance company that explores diversity and social justice issues. With immense pride and gratitude she presents her collaboration with Sharon Ross as her first art submission with the beautiful sisterhood of Blood, Milk & Tears at FENTSTER

Caryn Joy Colman hails from Toronto and Temagami. She is a landscape and portrait painter, chef, writer, mum, and klezmer violinist. A pun on the concept that text is a body of work, Caryn's scroll illustrates the words "blood, milk and tears" in Arabic, Hebrew, and English to represent what she has learned from this project: that the unity of Muslim and Jewish people in Canada is more than possible.

Karen Gold's work focuses on her love of painting, printmaking, collage, fabric and the aesthetic power of language. Her piece was inspired by the ancient Jewish blessing/poem 'The Prayer for Dew,' shaped by conversations with others at the art-making sessions for this project. It integrates images of sky, tears/dew, text (in Hebrew, Arabic, and English), and blood with thanks to Rula Kahil for the Arabic translations.  

Maysa Haque is a cat-loving, Muslim prairie girl who is interested in studying and advocating for reproductive and sexual health education in religious communities.

Alisha Kaplan is a poet from Toronto. She recently completed an MFA in Poetry at New York University and is currently working on a collection of poems centered around the concept of sacrifice and the world of Orthodox Judaism in which she was raised.

Sarah Katz is an aspiring artist, humanitarian and poet. Studying psychology at Glendon College (York University), she is currently doing research in homelessness and creativity. She endeavours to create kinder communities, and a more artful world, which she believes is highly influenced by her Jewish heritage. 

Sharon Katz is a visual artist who mixes the techniques of animation with those of painting. Her practice includes works on paper, video sculpture, and animated film. She has an MFA and blogs at Animation World Network.

Sara Abdel-Latif is a Ph.D. Candidate, Yoga Teacher and Reiki Healer. Her work explores Sufi feminine spirituality and the power of embodied religious practice.

Hannah Mayne is a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research is on Jewish women's prayer and political protest in Jerusalem. She has been photographing pomegranates, as well as other subjects, for several years.

Tiferet Nashman sees her Jewish, feminist and environmentalist identities as inherently linked. As a student of Disapora and Transnationalism Studies, she focused on issues of displacement and rootedness, and how these relate to the land. She is currently an environmental educator and community organizer with Shoresh Jewish Environmental Programs. Right now, her favourite tree is the Linden.

Sumaira Naz is an emerging visual artist, experimenting with sculptures and printmaking. Her works focus of themes of feminism, queerness, and environmentalism from a queer, desi, Muslim perspective. For her Blood, Milk & Tears piece, Sumaira focuses on the universality of the three elements in the human experience and the connection they have with nature, queer love and Islam. The DNA helix is incorporated in the structure of the scroll to represent the basic element of life which makes us the same as nature and each other. The drop motif is in the symbol of Allah, signifying the creator of all worlds. The quote used about creation and recitation speaks to the creation of humans by God, self-realization and the quest for knowledge of truth and justice.

Nilofar Noor is a University of Toronto graduate who explores art as a feminist vehicle for spiritual resilience and self-realization. Working with multi-media, she uses art for self and communal healing. She is passionate about interfaith and intercultural dialogue and has thoroughly enjoyed creating the scroll for the Blood, Milk and Tears project.

Rula Kahil is originally from Lebanon and was a philosophy professor at the American University of Beirut. She is currently completing a Ph.D. on the subject of shame at University of Toronto with a focus on Middle Eastern women. Rula is passionate about poetry as a powerful expression of lived experience. Poetry helps her in her personal life and is central to her dissertation.

Kanwal Rahim is a storyteller-poet, dancer, humorist-healer and arts facilitator. Kanwal works and plays at the intersection of theatre, dance, sustainable community-building and meditative arts, where she strives to understand how stories shape human relationships, resilience and revolutions. As a Pakistani-Egyptian-Emirati-Canadian, she reflects her nomadic experiences by excavating from these multiple places, spaces and identities. Kanwal has graced many stages in Toronto, including Sound Poets Circle, SpeakOut, South Asia Calling Festival, Canadian Women’s Foundation and the Feminist Art Conference.  She is currently working on her first collection of poetry and songs. Participation in the Blood, Milk and Tears project inspired her to engage more deeply with her feminist Muslim understanding of traditional inherited Islamic and Jewish texts on women and renewed faith in her personal Sufi practices. Sincere appreciation and gratitude to have the opportunity to co-create and connect in a circle of sisterhood with other Muslim and Jewish artist sisters in this city.

Sharon Ross was honoured to study Jewish and Muslim text with Jewish and Muslim women. We shared food and laughter, stories and sorrow, ideas and insights, creativity and community. We saw parts of ourselves reflected. Our crevices found companionship. Sisters across skin tones and over tones and varied scrolls and circumstance.

Shlomit Segal is a graphic designer, artist, feminist, cyclist, mom, reader, poet, granddaughter of Jewish refugees. She is concerned about the state of our planet and believes that one day there will be reconciliation and peace in Palestine/Israel. Her work has appeared on posters, magazine covers, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, the Mayworks Festival, to name a few.

Manaal Syed is a social worker with an interest in social justice and community based work. With a focus on drawing, her artistic expression is a tool for self care and faith-based learning. Her involvement in the Blood, Milk and Tears project allowed her to explore women’s identities in scriptures.

Soheila Zarrabi is a Muslim Iranian visual artist. Her work incorporates mix media and mono print. Soheila also identifies as an activist who believes in equality and freedom. This project afforded her an opportunity to express her anger towards violence against women carried out under religious laws in Iran, such as stoning women.

NOVEMBER 23, 2016 - FEBRUARY 22, 2017

OPENING EVENT | Thursday, December 1, 2016 | 7 – 9 PM | FREE

Using recycled cardboard and faded memories; Evan Tapper recreates his grandmother’s 1930s kitchen in Winnipeg to reflect on past and present hardships of starting life anew as an immigrant.

In a new site-specific installation for FENTSTER, artist Evan Tapper recreates his late grandmother Sylvia's 1930s kitchen using recycled cardboard to reflect on past and present hardships of starting life anew as an immigrant. The installation’s title originates from a well-known 1920s Yiddish song, Di Grine Kuzine (The Greenhorn Cousin) about an expectant newcomer to America who has become disillusioned by the harsh realities of immigrant life. Like the young woman in the song, Sylvia toiled at part-time jobs, saving to bring her husband to Winnipeg from Poland before WWII, despite being swindled by a fraudulent immigration agent.

Hearing this song in his youth, Tapper mistook the unfamiliar Yiddish words to mean “The Green Kitchen.” In the cardboard kitchen filled with green Wandering Jew paper plants, a young Sylvia sits alone, waiting. As with many cultures, for Jewish immigrants the kitchen is often a locus of memory and sharing enduring traditions through food. The installation raises questions about the responsibility of descendants of immigrants to support new arrivals to our country and prods us to consider what is handed down and what is lost in translation—between cultures, between places, between generations—through the immigrant experience.  

EVAN TAPPER

Born in Winnipeg, Evan Tapper lives in Toronto. He received an MFA from the School of Art, Carnegie Mellon University. Tapper was a resident artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu Japan, and the Jewish Museum New York. His animations, videos, performances and installations have been exhibited throughout Canada, the United States, Europe, South America, the Middle East, Australia, and Asia. Tapper’s work was featured at Nuit Blanche, Toronto, Melbourne International Animation Festival, Tate Modern, and has been broadcast on CBC. Tapper serves as Director of the Office of Continuing Studies at OCAD University and Lecturer at the University of Toronto. He is currently working on an ambitious experimental documentary animation, My Dybbuk, about the life of Canadian theatre director John Hirsch.

INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID KAUFMAN

AUGUST - OCTOBER 2016

Celebrating the food history of one of Toronto’s first Jewish neighbourhoods through a creative reimagining of the past.

Inspired by Mandel’s Creamery, a dairy shop that left its trace on Baldwin Street through the hand-painted Yiddish lettering remaining on its front window years after the Mandels moved on. The window and its Yiddish signage made headlines last summer when the OJA saved it from destruction after a new business replaced the Italian café that had long preserved this unique piece of Toronto’s Jewish past. Pass by Fentster day or night to get the flavour of our city’s original Jewish food culture.

August 14 – October 31, 2016

Monday, August 29, 5 - 8 PM | Public reception with live music & Ashkenazi Jewish nosheray

Curated by Evelyn Tauben (Fentster) together with Dara Solomon (Ontario Jewish Archives)

Presented by Fentster, Ashkenaz Festival and Ontario Jewish Archives, Blankenstein Family Heritage Centre

For more about Mandel's Dreamery, click here.

MAY - JULY 2016

A photographic journey through Morocco

The second installation in the window gallery is now on view featuring the striking photographs of Aaron Vincent Elkaim. The images track Elkaim’s travels in Morocco, the birthplace of his father, to Jewish sites in various stages of use and abandon. The portfolio reveals the complex layers of the relationships between the Jews of Morocco and their Muslim neighbours, who in many cases continue to be the guardians of Jewish cemeteries, synagogues and the shrines to Tzaddikim long after the vast majority of Jews have left.

A Co-Existence was made possible with support from Makom and the Betzalel Culture Fund.

MARCH / APRIL 2016

Unpacking symbols of the Passover seder in celebration of Makom’s move into our own place

Edible items on the seder plate act as tactile cues for telling the story of the Exodus during the seder. These foods embody themes of oppression, freedom, the vitality of life and the spring season. Continuing the tradition begun by Rochelle Rubinstein of displaying art in her Mon Ton Window Gallery, two Makom members created our inaugural storefront window presentation. As we move into our new space, we move towards a holiday with a massive move at its core. Architect / artist Joanne Frisch and curator / artist Evelyn Tauben teamed up to design an installation exploring six new questions for you to chew on, each related to the seder plate foods.