Though employing different media, both of the exhibitions that were simultaneously staged in adjacent spaces at the Jewish Museum in Melbourne through August and September of 2002 shared a focus on memory and highlighted the central role of the senses in the construction of subjectivity and identity.

Lauren Berkovitch’s installation, Salt and Honey, illustrated the central role of sensory experience in the imparting of Jewish tradition. However sceptical and/or critical modern Jews may be of religious orthodoxy and/or Israeli nationalism, they tend to respond nostalgically or sentimentally to the sounds of Yiddish folksongs and Hebrew religious melodies; to the taste and smell of traditional Sabbath and festival foods; to the joyful rhythms of wedding dances and the mournful strains of memorial prayers. In her installation, Berkovitch focuses on the significance of food and fluids in Jewish tradition.

On entering the space of Berkovitch’s installation on opening night, visitors were overpowered by the scent of fresh spices. This exhibition was an olfactory experience, not just a visual one, a feast for the nostrils as much as a feast for the eyes. The visual display was in fact minimalist. In the darkened room, two overhead spotlights shone onto two large round glass platters, covered in gleaming white salt crystals. On this carpet of salt Berkovitch had placed a number of glass trays containing glasses of wine and oil and piles of dried fruit, herbs and spices.

The abstract patterning of the arrangement and the whiteness of light and salt suggested formality, purity and austerity. The white light can be read symbolically as the Light, i.e. divinely inspired knowledge, but also analogically, as the actual lighting over the ritual dining table; the white salt, similarly, can refer analogically to the white table-cloths used for Sabbath and holydays, symbolically to toil and tears, but literally also to the staple flavour and preservative of meat, fish and vegetables. Honey and oil function likewise literally as ritual elements and cooking ingredients and symbolically as sweetness and light. Accompanying annotations linked the contents of the trays to the specific culinary traditions and religious rites of the weekly Jewish Sabbath and the annual Festivals.   

Barry’s exhibition, in the adjacent space, consisted of three walls of largely black and white large photographs shot in Poland in 1992 but re-printed and re-arranged 10 years later. Two of the walls were covered in images of street scenes and landscapes, interspersed with portraits of family members. The third wall was covered in images shot in the old Jewish cemetery of Lodz. The exhibition as a whole conjured up an autumnal experience of Poland: warm hazy days; carpets of golden autumn leaves; the scent of hay and daisies and the squawks of geese in the countryside; the textures of peeling walls and cobble-stoned streets; the urban smell of dust and decay. Barry’s angular country cousins, singleted and silent, and their blond children, hair streaked with hay and daisies, inhabit this autumnal memory of her visit to Poland. But the wall frieze of the Jewish cemetery is especially poignant. Its old stone gates and tombstones, decaying and neglected, are covered in a carpet of autumn leaves, the look of soft focus suggesting a tender and nostalgic veil of tears …

Barry has called her exhibition “Atonement”. Berkovitch represents the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), the annual day of fasting and penitence, with empty dishes, with the absence of food and drink. Barry, as an Australian artist of Polish Catholic roots exhibiting in an Australian Jewish museum, performs her atonement by insisting on visiting the cemetery of the dead  Jewish community of Lodz, recording its dereliction – and their absence. It is an elegy for the lost community. But Barry, as a sensuously sensitive second-generation Pole, continues to respond nostalgically to the sensual beauty of Poland – to its golden autumn, its dry warmth, its flower and hay-scented countryside, its old stone buildings and cobble-stoned streets, its hidden sorrows and absences…       

Freda Freiberg, February 2003

^[1] Dipesh Chakrabarty, `Afterword’, in Stephen Vlastos (ed), Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, University of California Press 1998, pp 294-5.