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The importance of healing
2 years today since my hip surgery, the words of the Nigerian poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo come to mind: “You see, in a culture like ours, we were never taught the importance of healing, we were only taught to survive. Not heal. Bury, survive.” Recovery Song is the handmade book of my recovery process from the […]
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A sketch for the centenary
My paternal grandfather Mikhail Gefter was a historian, philosopher, intellectual. As an adult, years after his death I learned of his pupils throughout the world, of his philosophical and historical writings, and of the www.gefter.ru platform for social sciences and intellectual thought named after him. Many called him МЯ (Михаил Яковлевич – Mikhail Yakovlevich). I called […]
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12 Bernstein
It was in the Summer 2016 when I first encountered the story of the derelict building at 12 Sholem Aleichem street (formerly Bernstein street). I came to Lviv to research Debora Vogel and her literary and artistic circles of the inter-war period. Wherever I turned I seemed to hear about the building – Google, resources at the Lviv Centre for Urban […]
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Lviv-London Double Impact
Join us at Pushkin House, London on November 14 for a special evening of imagery, history, words and music with London resident Asya Gefter, who has just launched the ‘Fragments of Memory’ project in Lviv, and Lviv resident Mark Tokar, double bass player and a key figure in the Ukrainian free jazz scene. Over the past two […]
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From Pop Art to Community Arts
It has been an absolute joy to work with Peter Young on a film ‘From Pop Art to Community Arts: Hackney in the 1970s-80s’ commissioned for A British Museum Partnership exhibition ‘Warhol to Walker: American prints from pop art to today’. This special exhibition explores the influence print movements have had on Hackney. Starting with […]
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Acacias Bloom
Last year I have been awarded an Asylum Arts Grant to collaborate with a Ukrainian musician Olesya Zdorovetska to research Debora Vogel, an overlooked Polish Yiddish writer of poetry, prose, literary and art criticism from the 1930s avant-garde Lviv. And so in July 2016, supported by the Asylum Arts (US) and a-n Travel Bursary (UK) off we went on our audio-visual […]
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Ukraine..August 24
Today is August 24 and Ukraine celebrates 25th anniversary of Independence Day. On a personal note, my grandfather was born on this day 98 years ago, in 1918. Interestingly, The Ukrainian People’s Republic, a predecessor of modern Ukraine, proclaimed its independence on 25 January 1918 (simple maths means he was a 2months baby in the […]
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In the footsteps of Hanukkah
Having grown up in Moscow in an assimilated environment I experienced mixed feelings about the traditions of my grandparents. I moved away from my family at the age of 21 in the attempt to make a new home, first in the Netherlands and then in the UK. It took me many years to discover the […]
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Impromptu from the Carpathians
Last month I reconnected with the places of my childhood holidays – Lviv and the Carpathian mountains in Western Ukraine. This area (former Galicia) was for centuries on the crossroads between Middle and Eastern Europe, and so it is small wonder that it has become a melting pot of people and cultures – Ukrainian, Jewish, […]