SoulSpa with Lab/Shul during the JEN weekend @ Romemu

First time doing aliyah with the regnederd Torah. Very exciting moment for the Divine Feminine lanaguage in Jewish ritual.

NY Artist Re-Genders the Torah While Keeping Tradition in the Jewish Journal

Unanticipated things happen when you flip the gender of the entire Torah. Eve/Hava becomes the first human created by Elohin, or God in the feminine plural. Out of Eve’s side Adam is created, and men (midhusbands?) rather than midwives Shifra and Puah make possible Moses’ birth in Egypt. The shifts change far more than their names. They alter the experience of those who created the story of the Jewish people. 

Yael Kanarek, 52, a New York-born, Israel-raised self-taught artist whose career began by painting tourists’ portraits on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, has become enmeshed in biblical text. 

She is the first artist-in-residence at Congregation Romemu in New York, a vibrant unaffiliated congregation whose rabbi, David Ingber, weaves together traditional Jewish services with lively music, a Jewish renewal approach and things he learned studying Eastern practices, like meditation.

Kanarek moved into Romemu’s new building at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 105th Street, a former YMCA located across from the church sanctuary it rents for services, days earlier. She warned it might be–messy. But in the narrow room was just a desk with a computer and a Hebrew language book on Sufism, Islam’s mystical sect. The only other furniture was a comfortable red couch, where we sat to talk. On the cinderblock wall facing us were visual art renditions of Kanarek’s re-gendered Torah. 

Kanarek has always loved words. She creates fine jewelry incorporating Hebrew, Yiddish, English and Sanskrit words, created a vibrant, word-based, site-specific sculpture for the U.S. Embassy in Zimbabwe and now is re-gendering the entire Chumash, or Five Books of Moses. Kanarek calls them the Five Books of Mosha, explaining, “it means ‘to pull out of the water’ in present tense.” Out of the waters of Jewish tradition, Kanarek is pulling out a new way to see ourselves in Torah.

A decade ago, she began listening to Michael Laitman’s lectures about kabbalah. Laitman is a Russian-born Israeli teacher of Jewish mysticism, whose livestream reaches across the world. 

“I got stuck because it became clear that he is a man teaching men. What do I work with?” — Yael Kanarek 

“I couldn’t stop listening even though I didn’t understand anything for several years” because of the esoteric content. “When he talks about the sefirot, about Zohar, I can receive some very fine things. I received the tools of how to do the work. How do you work with kavanah (intention), with ratzon (will).”

“Then I got stuck because it became clear that he is a man teaching men. What do I work with? Women don’t have any books,” she said. “We don’t have anything that describes our relationship with the Divine in our image at all.”

And she wondered: “What if it was all reversed? How do I make it mine? How do I bring my spiritual body into it?”

That led to Mosha. Although not religious, Kanarek knew the Bible because of her Israeli upbringing. She returned to the U.S. in 1991 at 24, having absorbed the idea that “we can’t change the text.” 

Spurred by a need to see herself in the text, “two years ago I sat down to do it. I started with Bereshit” (Genesis). Kanarek has finished re-gendering Genesis, last year did a “hackathon” at Manhattan’s 14th Street Y in which people worked on Exodus together, and is two thirds of the way through re-gendering Leviticus, which she has named VaTikrah instead
of Vayikra.

Her work is already inspiring others: Rabbi Bronwen Mullin wants to create a new trope, or way to chant Kanarek’s text.

Kanarek’s re-regendering of Torah “destabilizes our perspective reading our sacred story on multiple levels,” Ingber said. 

“It invites those who identify as women to read themselves in the story, those who identify as men to be able to read places that might have previously seemed to exclude them, like being a midwife. It destabilizes fixities and gender constructions. And by not changing the basic narrative, it provides distance without distortion, so changes how we understand the text but doesn’t elide over difficult pieces of Torah that still have to be dealt with,” he said. Kanarek’s project “maintains the basic meaning of the text but invites a new way of imagining ourselves and reading ourselves in, and does it in subtle and very bold ways.”

Debra Nussbaum Cohen is the Jewish giving maven at Inside Philanthropy and is a freelance journalist in New York City.

Making Holes in the Torah

In celebration of Shavout, I'm launching a new project called Nikuvei Genesis. Here's a short  interview on LabaJournal.com 

Art in Embassies Commission

Yael Kanarek is awarded a large-scale commission for the new US embassy in Harare. The hanging sculpture designed with the words DAY/NIGHT in the 19 local languages is scheduled for installation in 2019.

Art Review by Illya Szilak in the Huffington Post

In her outstanding new show, “Kisses Kisses,” at bitforms, Yael Kanarek offers an illuminating view of her wide-ranging digital and multi-media practice. Co-curated by Kerry Doran and Dylan Kerr, and thoughtfully installed, the exhibition exists as a series of overlapping windows and screens. It begins on the street where the viewer confronts a wall of bright yellow flyers, the kind that used to be plastered all over the East Village.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/illya-szilak/art-review-yael-kanareks_b_9778852.html

NYT: Yael Kanarek Has Her Fifth Show at Bitforms

http://nyti.ms/1SALPJN

"Kisses Kisses" opens April 12 @ bitforms gallery, NYC

Yael Kanarek's fifth solo show at bitforms gallery is opening on April 12. The show, title "Kisses Kisses" is the first time her twenty years old storyspace is presented as an immersive installation. More soon.

The Time Room on Governors Island

The Time Room: Three videoclock, Explosion 1960, Jungle, and Swing will be on view May 23-July 20 on Governors Island as part of the New York Electronic Art Festival. The Time Room is presented by Harvestworks.  Look for building 5A at Nolan Park. 

The Sick Rose, The Drawing Center, 1994

This was my first group exhibition in New York. Holland Cotter reviewed it for the New York Times: The Joys of Childhood Re-Examined, March 25, 1994.

RAINBOW at The U.S. Mission to the OECD, Paris

Rainbow, Toward a New Balance, Made in the USA, 2013, is on view at the residence of Daniel W. Yohannes, the ambassador of the U.S. mission to the OECD, in Paris. The catalog, which arrived this morning, includes an introduction by the curator, Camille Benton.

The Early Disruptors: 7 Masterpieces of '90s Net Art Everyone Should Know About

"Her immersive project has delightful retro-futuristic touches; characters rediscover 'the legendary Silicon Canyon' and muse about the fate of floppy disks. Updated over decades, World of Awe is an extremely dense work with layered links, pages upon pages of text, and fully tracked soundscapes." 

The Early Disruptors: 7 Masterpieces of '90s Net Art Everyone Should Know About, —Dylan Kerr, Artspace, March 27, 2015

Can you see? Momenta Art Gallery, 1996

"Yael Kanarek's Untitled paintings (from the Love Letters From the World of Awe series) use acrylic, candy sprinkles and papier-mache to question the power of art as a signifier of the sublime. The texts from this series are letters from an alienated traveler searching through an artificial landscape for the experience of awe.

"Kanarek's cartoon bombs, paper snow flakes, demonic Dr. Seuss characters, and birds flying in a smiley face formation pull every cheap trick in the sublime, romantic, painted, landscape book, all to no avail. Such desperation emphasizes the limitations of art, contrasted with the sincere desire to transcend those limitations."

www.momentaart.org 1996

Can you see? 1996. Acrylic and candy sprinkles.

World Technology Award 2014 in the Arts category

An inspiring gala dinner at the World Technology Network Summit & Awards in the company of great inventors from the many fields of technological developments. On my right sat the lobbyist for Elon Musk's Tesla Motors and SpaceX. On my left, a NYC friend of MBA Polymers in the UK, who develop and manufacture sustainable plastics.