Yiddish Dybbuk
a video trilogy, exhibited at the Labirynt Gallery in Lublin, Poland, as part of the group exhibition Mame-Loshn: Yiddish - Body - Language.
Curated by Drorit Gur-Arie & Tal Schwartz, 2021.
 

In the video trilogy Yiddish Dybbuk, the artist takes on the persona of a false prophet or perhaps a madman. The prophecies are Yiddish translations of the texts of three of the Prophet Ezekiel’s major visions, which Meshullam mispronounces, making them incomprehensible. For Meshullam, the biblical Ezekiel who was exiled from Jerusalem to Babylonia is the essential representative of the hybrid nature of Yiddish, as a prophet who was “here” as well as “there” – or perhaps neither here nor there. The prophetic speech as declaimed by the artist becomes like a dybbuk’s voice: the body is speaking a language the person does not understand, while the films themselves become cross-breeds internalizing the logic of the language.