Sukkot – The Feast of Tabernacles

Sukkot – The Feast of Tabernacles
30 September – 5 November 2023
ÖSKG / Tjörnedala art gallery

Channa Banker
Karin Brygger
Andjeas Ejiksson and Joanna Zawieja
Goldin+Senneby
Susanna Jablonski

Curator: Paulina Sokolov

Vernissage Saturday 30 September at 13:00 – 16:00
Lecture and conversation with exhibiting artists, moderated by Paulina Sokolov, at 14:00
Curator's show Sunday 1 October at 12:00


Based on the Jewish holiday of Sukkot – the Feast of Tabernacles, which falls the day before the opening, seven artists reflect on experiences of displacement, memory and rituals as a strategy for survival and for creating a new home.

A tree that twists around its own axis to adapt to changing climates, a construction description based on time and the materials that happen to be in place, handwritten scrolls of paper that polyfont testify to a living (and past) Jewish Europe and an exhibition hall transformed to a hut of prehistoric plants. That is what the audience will encounter in the autumn exhibition at Tjörnedala art gallery. The background is the series about Swedish minorities that the art gallery started last year, then with the Sami exhibition Máttaráhkko och jag. This year's exhibition, curated by Paulina Sokolow, approaches the Jewish as a set of experiences and histories, rather than a group with similar customs and practices. The exhibition features artists who both identify as Jews and those who do not at all.

- Since I myself have a split relationship with the Jewish and was not raised with customs or religion, I think it is so fantastic about art that it manages to be so open and ambiguous. the circumstances that have made us exist all over the world and that the limiting laws that have surrounded us throughout the ages have given rise to a strong desire to create a universal community, a utopian society simply, says Paulina Sokolow, the curator of the exhibition.

The starting point that gives the exhibition its framework is the Feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkot in Hebrew, whose first day this year falls on September 29. The holiday commemorates the escape from Egypt, when, according to legend, the enslaved Jews were given the chance to leave the country and wander together through the desert. Along the way, they built temporary dwellings from what was available. Visually, echoes of the leaf hut will be felt through the work of the artist duo Goldin+Senneby The Plot, where the walls are painted with stencils of the shapes of the fossils of plants that covered the earth during the Carboniferous period 350 million years ago.