Prophecy of Place: Quintan Ana Wikswo

Quintan Ana Wikswo
Prophecy of Place: photographs, poetry, video and assemblage
August 14, 2011 – February 15, 2012

Opening Event:
Monday, September 12 | 6–9pm

Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
New York, NY 10011
www.cjh.org/
www.quintanwikswo.com

We are pleased to announce the first solo museum exhibition by Quintan Ana Wikswo.

Within a luminous constellation of photographs, text-based video installations, and site-specific interactive assemblages, Quintan Ana Wikswo traverses sites and times whose rich, difficult and nearly invisible histories are hidden at the heart of Jewish experience. Connecting the 10th century to the 21st, these works create a captivating and intriguing vision of the Jewish encounter with exile, shelter and belonging.

Over two years, Wikswo worked in Portugal, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Russia and Argentina, gathering damaged military typewriters and cameras manufactured by slave labor during Fascist-era dictatorships and using them to create abstracted documentaries and fractured portraits of trauma, resistance and survival throughout time.

Her works draw on Jews’ practice of inscribing and illuminating experience in poetry of prophecy and prayer, notably the radiant manuscript paintings and powerful mourning poetry of Tisha B’Av and elegies first written during the Crusades and the Inquisition, as well as works of conscience and resistance in more recent history.

Quintan Ana Wikswo creates at the intersections of text, photography, installation, video, and performance. Her work appears in museums, galleries, publications and performance spaces throughout Europe, Asia and the United States. Her writing appears in prominent journals including Kenyon Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, New American Writing, and many more. She is the recipient of several major grants, fellowships and residencies in the U.S. and abroad, including support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. Through ongoing collaborations with composers, choreographers, and performers, her lyric texts and photographic work often finds voice in dance, video installation, and performance. Her studio is located in Los Angeles.