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Performing the Canadian Jewish Archive

Fellowship Program: Performing the Canadian Jewsih Archive (PCJA)

This is an ongoing initiative under the aegis of the Endowed Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies at Concordia University and is administered by Prof. Miranda Crowdus. The general goal of the PCJA program is to generate an ongoing series of critical research and creative projects from a range of disciplines that will: (1) utilize archival resources from a wide variety of current and original angles and approaches; (2) contribute to the breadth of critical scholarship investigating the Jewish-Canadian experience; and, (3) stimulate innovative interdisciplinary and creative engagement with archival resources to transform them into active agents of cultural production. While there are specific calls issued for potential applicants to work on specific projects, applications are welcomed throughout the year.

Recipients and their projects

Krzysztof Majer, PhD

Mika Benesh (Recipient 2024) is a designer-researcher working between unceded Gadigal + Dharug Country and Tiohtià:ke in the australian and canadian colonies. Mika's art and research traces relationships between cultural institutions and archives, Jewish material cultures, queer/trans lives & movements, white supremacy and settler colonialism. Across Mika's practice, he is interested in catching a small hold of many Jewish futures.

For the PCJA fellowship in 2024, Mika worked with and curated "A Collector's Passion" a dynamic collection of Judaica artefacts that was gifted to the Federation CJA and the Montreal Jewish Community by Irwin Tauben. The collection is housed in the hallway of the Gelber Conference Centre at Federation CJA and is dedicated to the memory of Julie and Morty Tauben. The collection has been lovingly shaped by Irwin's aesthetic apprecation and personal interest in the different objects that make up its composition. Photos of the collection can be found here: Irwin Tauben Judaica (howardkay.ca).

Natasha Doyon (Recipient 2022-2023) is an interdisciplinary artist and art educator who lives in Montreal. Of Israeli Canadian background, her work is based on narrative, biography, and ideas about belonging. She uses both temporal and permanent materials to express these specific concepts. her work attempts a conversation between historic and probable bodies of sensual knowledge. All the while weaving between notions of social equity, access, and pluralities of being. Her project is a translation/interpretation based on selected voices (interviews and abstract sound bites) transformed into soundscapes accompanied by abstracted visual traces of works and archival photographs found in the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archive. These audiovisual vignettes will amplify the less audible/visible voices of the cultural workers whose distinct expressions, as double minorities in Quebec have inspired what is our contemporary Quebecois/Canadian culture.

Angelic Goldsky (they/them) (Recipient 2022-2023) is a queer non-binary poet-musician, artist-scholar and community arts coordinator. They hold a Master of Arts in Arts Politics from New York University and a Bachelor of Media Studies from University of British Columbia. Angelic's project for the fellowship was 'Forgotten (And Found) Jews: Refuseniks, Queers and Beyond: an exploration of found & (safe) & sound poetry". Through a queer lens and a focus on spritual justice, the project will be a poetic and creative exploration of the word "Refusenik" plays between the intersection of queer and/or refusenik and Jewish identity, as a doorway to investigate the meeting ground of Russian-Jewish and Queer-Jewish processes of locating refuge, immigrating, and building kinship in Canada.

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