Correspondences

About

Artists and sisters Katy and Rebecca Beinart present artwork and research developed through a process of correspondence during the pandemic. The exhibition features paper sculptures, prints and videos that emerge from their long-term collaboration exploring family history and migration. Correspondences focuses on the story of the artists’ Jewish great-grandparents Morris (Moishe) Shreibman and Sarah (Zlata) Gitovitch who left Eastern Europe in the 1900s to come to London and settle in the East End, where they married, joining a growing Yiddish-speaking community. The artists' research draws on oral histories collected by the family, archival material from the British Library and Jewish Museum London, and autobiographies and histories by Jewish East End writers. Personal stories of family and community intersect with the lively radical politics that flourished in the area in the early 20th century. Moishe, Zlata and their wider family worked as paper-bag makers, cabinet-makers and hairdressers, and like many other working class Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe they were actively involved in politics and Trade Unions. A Yiddish anarchist newspaper, the “Arbeter Fraynd” (Workers Friend) was published in the East End at this time, and pubs, halls and print-shops in the area were known as meeting places for communist, socialist and anarchist groups.

Correspondences emerged through an ongoing conversation between the artists, via post, sending back and forth a handwritten scroll and paper patterns, as well as through the contemporary correspondence of the online zoom call. This led to the creation of print blocks using Yiddish text from the Workers Friend newspaper, paper sculptures that reference the family trades, an online ‘walking tour’ and a performance. Tim Ingold talks about correspondence “in the sense of not coming up with some exact match or simulacrum for what we find or the things and happenings going on around us, but of answering them with interventions, questions and responses of our own. It is as though we are involved in an exchange of letters.” (Ingold, 2015*) The literal and metaphorical correspondences that have formed the structure of the project came partly from the necessity of collaborating from two     different places during a year of pandemic lockdowns. This process has also opened up a way of corresponding through time, connecting to ancestors and histories, using analogue technologies of communication as forms of exchange that take place slowly.

*Tim Ingold, ‘Foreword’, in Philip Vanini, ed. Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research (Routledge, 2015)