Boaz Kaiz­man. Green Area Boaz Kaizman

On the an­niv­er­sary year “2021: 1700 Years of Jew­ish Life in Ger­many,” the Mu­se­um Lud­wig has in­vit­ed the artist Boaz Kaiz­man (born in 1962 in Tel Aviv, has lived and worked in Cologne since 1993) to de­vel­op a new work. The video in­s­tal­la­tion Grü­nan­lage (Green Area) com­pris­es six­teen new videos in sev­en large pro­jec­tions across two walls. It will be pre­sent­ed in the large ex­hi­bi­tion hall at the Mu­se­um Lud­wig span­n­ing around 200 square me­ters.

Se­lect­ed pas­sages from in­di­vi­d­u­al videos can be heard in the ex­hi­bi­tion space; at the same time, vis­i­tors can lis­ten to the videos us­ing head­phones. Land­s­capes rep­re­sent a com­mon vi­su­al el­e­ment be­tween the works. Most of th­ese are green ar­eas in Cologne, places of func­tio­n­al and ur­ban­ized na­ture, and thus re­main in­de­fi­nite, be­tween ur­ban and na­t­u­ral space.

Kaiz­man bas­es his in­s­tal­la­tion on his own ex­pe­ri­ence. He is shown do­ing ev­ery­day ac­tiv­i­ties—on the way to his stu­dio, pre­par­ing meals, or jog­ging in the park. He al­so re­flects on the ar­tis­tic pro­cess by re­ca­pi­t­u­lat­ing his pre­vi­ous work from the the­mat­ic per­spec­tive of Jew­ish life in the past and pre­sent and in­te­grat­ing it in­to the in­s­tal­la­tion in the form of short quo­ta­tions. Thus, in a me­di­at­ed way, Jew­ish life in Ger­many be­comes the self-evi­dent cen­ter of Kaiz­man’s new work with­out be­ing its ex­plic­it top­ic. With his work, Kaiz­man in­quires in­to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of me­m­o­ry, the pres­ence of his­to­ry, and the form in which it is in­scribed in life sto­ries.