After Halle

On October 9, 2019, the highest Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, an armed right-wing extremist attempted to force his way into the synagogue in Halle. When the attacker failed to breach the door by force, he shot down a woman outside and, sometime later, a customer in a nearby kebab shop.

 After Halle investigates the trauma of survival and the after-effects of what could have turned into a mass murder. Talya Feldman’s ten-channel sound installation orchestrates the voices of ten of the attack’s survivors, including her own. Visitors can hear the melodies sung that day following the end of the religious service. The name given to these songs, which are for the most part without lyrics, is “nigunim”; they are often sung at religious gatherings and embody a collective spiritual and religious experience. In the installation, each voice is assigned its own loudspeaker, the outer casing of which bears visual reference to the ethical code of triage, the set of criteria medical staff applies in a crisis to decide which patients should be treated, i.e., kept alive. In its incorporation of this allusion, the sound installation poses the question of social responsibility “after Halle.”

The media artist Talya Feldman, born in Denver, Colorado, is a doctoral student at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts and survivor of the Halle attack. Her sound installation The Violence We Have Witnessed Carries a Weight on Our Hearts was awarded the 2021 DAGESH Art Prize. She has also received worldwide recognition for projects to fight right-wing extremist terror in cooperation with the activist network NSU-Watch.

 The art room on the second floor of the permanent exhibition is dedicated to contemporary Jewish art; it presents changing exhibitions of artistic positions that address Jewish tradition.

 As part of the “Lernnacht” or learning night, the exhibition opening will take place on November 9, 2021.