The Line and the Circle By Sharone Lifschitz
Video Installation Opens February 11

New York, NY - The Jewish Museum is presenting The Line and the Circle by Sharone Lifschitz, a video installation, from February 11 to August 21, 2011 in the Museum’s Barbara and E. Robert Goodkind Media Center. In this video (19 min. 26 sec.), Sharone Lifschitz documents a two-week period she spent working with her mother in February 2009. Returning together to the darkroom for the first time in more than twenty years, mother and daughter printed fourteen images, selected by the artist and taken by her mother and other members of Kibbutz Nir Oz. The photographs, made between 1959 and the early 1980s, depict life in a community whose socialist values represent a particular moment in Israel’s history. The printing of the images is itself an act of nostalgia, since digital photography has made such work almost obsolete. The process followed by the two women shapes a conversation through both content and ritual and the photographs become a catalyst for a new understanding to emerge—between parent and child, artist and artist, past and present. The video is a meditation on the vanishing space of the photographic darkroom and the demise of a socialist utopia Lifschitz’s mother tried to create.

An afternoon gallery talk by Sharone Lifschitz will be offered at The Jewish Museum on Tuesday, March 8 at 2 pm. The gallery talk is FREE with admission to The Jewish Museum.

London-based artist Sharone Lifschitz was born in Israel and grew up in Kibbutz Nir Oz. Trained as an architect at the Architectural Association, London, and as a visiting student to the Architectural Department of the Cooper Union, New York, she left architecture for the visual arts in 2000, completing her MA in Fine Art in 2002 at Central St. Martins, London. Lifschitz’s work has been shown in group exhibitions in London, Buenos Aires, Minneapolis, Luxembourg, and New York. In 2005, her work was included in Dreams and Trauma, an Israeli film festival, and in an exhibition at Berlin’s House of World Cultures. Her work can be found in private and public collections, including the Jewish Museum Munich, Lenbachhaus Munich and the Great Eastern Hotel, London.

Located on the third floor of The Jewish Museum, the Goodkind Media Center houses a digital library of radio and television programs from the Museum’s National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting (NJAB). It also features a changing exhibition space dedicated to video and new media. Using computer workstations, visitors are able to search material by keyword and by categories such as art, comedy, drama, news, music, kids, Israel, and the Holocaust.

About the National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting

The National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting, founded in 1981 in association with the Charles H. Revson Foundation, is the largest and most comprehensive body of broadcast materials on 20th century Jewish culture in the United States. With a mission to collect, preserve and exhibit television and radio programs related to the Jewish experience, the NJAB is an important educational resource for critical examination of how Jews have been portrayed and portray themselves, and how the mass media has addressed issues of ethnicity and diversity. Its collection is comprised of 4,300 broadcast and cable television and radio programs.