A large-scale open-air installation by Anna Kamyshan, Nabatele suspends a floating shtetl synagogue on a massive rock above Venice, imagining shelter without ground and belonging without borders.
Drawing on nabat—a call to attention in moments of danger—and softened by the Yiddish -ele, the work becomes a quiet, almost silent signal: present, steady, and persistent. Its continuously lit windows echo the ner tamid, the eternal flame, offering inner light as a response to the turbulence and uncertainty of our time.
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Anna Kamyshan
Ukrainian, London-based multidisciplinary artist and architect of Jewish heritage, working with complex, spiritual, past- and future-inspired, playful, and dreamlike visions, ideas, illusions, and spaces. Her practice has been presented at the Venice Biennale, the Milan Triennial, and the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv, among other international platforms.
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Montreal Jewish Museum
An innovative place to connect with diverse Jewish heritage and history through new arts and cultural experiences. Operating as a community-driven, experimental cultural hub, it brings Montreal’s Jewish past and present to the public through exhibitions, events, food, music, tours, and research—inviting people of all backgrounds to connect with culture, history, and community.
Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks, curators
Maria Veits is a London-based curator and researcher whose work interrogates how state power, legal structures, and cultural institutions produce social reality. Working across collaborative and site-responsive formats, she develops transnational frameworks that challenge national narratives and institutional authority.
Yevgeniy Fiks is a Moscow-born, New York–based artist and organizer whose practice reactivates suppressed histories of Yiddish culture, diasporic memory, and Jewish political thought. Across multiple media, his work confronts nationalism, cultural erasure, and the afterlives of Soviet and post-Soviet ideologies.
Together, they have developed an independent, non-national curatorial and artistic platform shaped by Yiddish experiences of diaspora, migration, and doikeyt (hereness), advancing Yiddishland as a political and cultural proposition.
Supporters
Our heartfelt gratitude to those whose belief and generosity helped lift Nabatele into the sky above the city of Venice.
Amos Lieberman
Dan & Elina Timoshenko
Steve O’Hana
SDG Arts & Science Foundation
Acknowledgements
We warmly thank everyone who supported this project through their advice, encouragement, connections, and generous sharing of time and expertise.
Anastasia and Victor Lander
Mendel and Chana Kalmenson
Dmitry Volkov
Daniel Weil
David Landau
Edward Shenderovich
Francesca Sarah Toich
Igor Piatigorsky
Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper
Israel Goldsmidt
Ivan Rozhanskiy
Katya Krausova
Masha Nasimova
Richard Ingleby
Svetlana Dragaeva
Collateral Event of the 61st International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia