(Dis)possessed

The year 2024 marks POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews’ 10th anniversary. To celebrate this occasion, we want to make the voices of Jewish artists heard by creating a rotating, lively, polyphonic space in the last gallery of the Core Exhibition—a space for Jewish artists to express themselves. The third artist presented in the Rotating Gallery is composer Alex Roth.

• 24 July–5 August, during museum opening hours, in the last gallery of the Core Exhibition

Alex Roth on his work:

"'(Dis)possessed' responds to objects in POLIN’s collection that were made using (mis)appropriated Torah parchment during and after World War II. All the sounds heard in the piece come from these objects.

According to Jewish religious law, desecrated Torahs should be buried. However, these artefacts also testify to the Holocaust and its aftermath and therefore they were accepted into the museum’s collection for the purpose of educating the public. This installation attempts to navigate and express these historical and religious complexities through the medium of sound.

Even though a couple of the objects are actual musical instruments (a banjo and a hand drum), playing them in the conventional way could be considered sacrilegious. So, with the permission of the Chief Rabbi of Poland, and assistance from expert sound engineer Michał Kupicz, I employed unconventional recording techniques to capture sounds from the artefacts without touching them directly.

Most of the sounds used in this piece were recorded using contact microphones, which, unlike conventional microphones, pick up vibrations within an object itself, rather than through the air.

Another technique I used was to place the objects back in their storage boxes and amplify the resonant frequencies of these internal spaces. In this context, the box becomes a metaphorical burial chamber, and the recording process symbolically enacts the ritual of burying the desecrated Torahs. The low drone produced by this latter technique becomes, in the musical composition, a resting place from which the other sounds rise up, and into which they return.

With both techniques, the subtle vibrations detected are inaudible to the 'naked' ear, and so, in a sense, the project reveals the hidden soundworlds of these objects, releasing the secrets they have kept for decades.

Having built up a sample library of sounds from each object, I created virtual instruments that allowed me to play them via a MIDI keyboard, and to process the resulting audio digitally. The music I composed is almost entirely based on cantorial melodies associated with the specific sections of the Torah that are still legible on the parchments. These melodies, which were sent to me specially by Cantor Rachel Weston, have been digitally processed to mirror the transformation of the Torah fragments. Slowing them down creates the impression of being suspended in time, echoing the stories of the objects themselves.

For me, this project is a way of reclaiming the sacred parts of these objects, bringing them back into the realm of Jewish culture. This idea of dispossession and repossession is actually the subject of the text on one of the objects (the loose banjo soundboard), from the Book of Deuteronomy. The passage tells of Moses leading the Israelites to take possession of the promised land (Canaan) by expelling the indigenous Ammorite people, led by King Sihon of Heshbon. In a rallying speech to his tribe, Moses recounts how God has instructed him to 'Begin to drive (him) out, and provoke war with him.' (Deuteronomy 2:24 as translated in the printed Tanach published by ArtScroll, 1996). Clearly, this story is still playing out today. 

In this work, I invite you to enter a sonic space designed from a position of 'radical acceptance' (a technique used in dialectical behaviour therapy to manage painful situations outside one’s control), in which Jewish and non-Jewish elements—here manifested in material form—can coexist in spite of past atrocities.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the following people, whose contributions helped bring this project into being: Ewa Chomicka, Alicja Kaczmarek-Poławska, Aleksandra Janus, Michał Kupicz, Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Renata Piątkowska, Aldona Modrzewska, Małgorzata Bogdańska-Krzyżanek, Cantor Rachel Weston, Piotr Kowalik, Matan Shefi, Rami Avraham Efal, Magda Rubenfeld, Kasia Witek, Justyn Hunia, Paul Cooper, Soren Gauger, Jacqueline Nicholls; and Wiktor Bury, Michał Warmusz and Mariusz Gąsior at the Cricoteka Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor in Kraków."

Read more about Rotating Gallery →

Partners:

Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage – project: "Rotating Gallery as part of POLIN Museum’s 10th birthday celebration (developing a network of Jewish artists)."