Curators: Michal Mor
Opening Date: 2022 - 2023
This exhibition is a new chapter in the life of an object that is a copy of the Deller Sukkah, a 19th-century German wooden sukkah.
The sukkah is a temporary structure that Jews build during the holiday of Sukkot (the Feast of the Tabernacle) in memory of the temporary dwellings built by the people of Israel during the period of their wandering in the desert after their exodus from Egypt. The structures are covered with palm fronds or other leaves, leaving the roof partially open to the sky, in fulfillment of the commandment “For seven days you shall live outside in temporary shelters” (Leviticus 23:42).
In previous exhibitions, the replica of the Deller Sukkah was displayed as a complete structure. In the current installation, the Sukkah has been dismantled and its panels hung on the wall next to one another, creating new meaning. The walls of the temporary structure become a ten-meter-long landscape painting, while the wooden frame remains standing, without walls, naked within the transparent gallery. Hung on the wall, the landscape has the potential to return to being the four walls of the Sukkah and to its function as a ritual object.
The two Deller sukkahs – the “original” (on display at the Israel Museum) and the “replica” – tell about different families, erased communities, multiple layers of history, distant geographical spaces, persecutions, and wanderings. In the present installation another layer is added to the biography of the double: documentation of the event in which it was shrouded in black in an act of protest (picture), and a video documentation of the moment in which it was disassembled, packed up, and willingly but painfully removed from the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art as part of an exodus of works.
The near-replica of the Deller Sukkah is part of a research-creation project on temporary dwellings, a subject the Sala-Manca group has been exploring in cooperation with various artists since 2014. In the project, the various Sukkahs become a means of research and creation and a space of performance. At the same time they become objects whose placement encourages us to explore concepts such as transience, nomadism, ownership, and exile, raising questions about the ontology of the original, about the object as witness, and about reproduction as interpretation.
“Biography of a Double” is a new curatorial work created in the framework of the “OWL LAB - Objects, Words and Labyrinths. An Attempt to Get Lost in Performance Research,” founded by Dr. Diego Rotman as part of the Department of Theater Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in collaboration with the Mamuta Art and Research Center under the direction of Lea Mauas.
The Deller Sukkah
Around 1840, Yaakov and Esther Deller of Fischach, Bavaria, commissioned a local painter to paint the wooden panels of their sukkah. On the eastern panel of the sukkah the unknown artist painted Jerusalem with the Western Wall in its center – copied from an 1837 lithography by Jeoseph Schwartz, a German-born geographer and painter who had emigrated to Jerusalem in 1833. On the other walls he painted the Jewish Street in Fischach and the landscape of the town, thus connecting between a longing for the Land of Israel and the here-and-now of the Deller family. He painted the Deller family home with Esther Deller at its entrance, and on another wall he painted a forest with contemporary images. In addition, he copied small pictures of Jewish holidays from prayer books printed in Sulzbach, Germany in 1826.
In 1937 the Deller family escaped Nazi Germany for Ecuador. At the initiative of Dr. Heinrich Feuchtwanger, a collector of Jewish art, the members of the Deller family agreed to donate the Sukkah, which remained in the attic in their house in Fischach, to the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem. Berta (Bracha) Frenkel of the Ehrentreu family of Munich, a relative of the collector, smuggled the Sukkah out, laying the wooden panels one on top of the other so as to hide the paintings, as it was forbidden for Jews to take works of art with them when leaving Germany. The Deller family Sukkah has been a part of the permanent exhibit of the Jewish Art and Life Wing of the Israel Museum, ever since the museum’s opening in 1967.
Replica of a Sukkah
In late winter of 2016, in the basement of the former leper’s hospital in Jerusalem, the Sala-Manca group undertook a secret and meticulous mission in cooperation with artists Nir Yahalom and Ktura Manor: to build an unauthorized replica of the Deller Sukkah.
They photographed the original sukkah in the Israel Museum, purchased wooden plywood boards coated with beech, weathered the wood for an antique look, flew to Fischach to locate the structures painted on the walls of the sukkah, visited the graves of the Deller family and the local synagogue (now a dental clinic), and returned to Jerusalem to recreate the paintings. As part of the research process they conducted interviews and documented the process in a video entitled “A Geography of Cracks,” also presented in this exhibit.
The replica of the Deller Sukkah is not a perfect replica. It contains several significant substitutions. The figure of Esther Deller is erased from the front of the family house, and in her place next to the bell at the entrance are the names of the two families (a Turkish family and a German family) who were living in the house at the time of the artists’ visit to Fischach; the church tower, which had been removed from the original sukkah at a certain point in its history, is reinstated in the replica; and on the walls of the synagogue is added a pencil drawing of the sign of the dentist who purchased the building after the war.
Symbolically speaking, one can say that the replica of the Deller Sukkah in Jerusalem transforms the view of Fischach from a local pastoral landscape to a subject of longing for a scenery and life that are no longer; and the relationship to Jerusalem from one of diasporic longing to one of belonging. The Deller Sukkah in the Israel Museum is a ritual object that has become an object of ethnography; the replica is a work of art that has the potential to serve as a ritual object. As part of the process of constructing the replica of the museum object, Sala-Manca group invited artists Adi Kaplan and Shahar Carmel to create a model of the replica. The model is also presented in this exhibition.
A Shrouded Sukkah
In December 2021 the Deller Sukkah replica was installed at the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art as part of a group exhibition titled “The Institution,” curated by Svetlana Reingold. Days before the opening of the exhibition, the mayor of Ramat Gan asked the museum to remove a controversial painting by artist David Reeb. The curator refused, and in an act of unauthorized protest, the vasta majority of the participating artists shrouded their works (see photo). The sukkah was thus “erased” from the gallery, becoming a large object of protest – a black box within the white box of the museum space. As part of the protest, and in expression of the pain and difficulty of taking down the work, Sala-Manca created a video work in which the building of the sukkah is projected backwards in slow motion, turning into an act of disassembly, alongside a video documentation of the packing-up of the parts of the sukkah and its removal from the museum. And so the dismemberment of the replica and its removal from the exhibition became an act of poetry and protest.
