Multimedia Installation, Social Practice Gathering
2024
As the Hebrew anniversary of October 7th (a holiday of joy) approached, I blended grief and joy by bringing the kri’ah motif into a sukkah installation. During the holiday of Sukkot, I gathered a group of Palestinian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Iranian, Lebanese, and Jews from North & South America to connect over the exploration of grief and joy.
A centerpiece of our gathering was a collective reading of an excerpt from Ross Gay’s “Inciting Joy”, in which he suggests that perhaps joy is what “effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks”.
VIDEO PERFORMANCE, INSTALLATION, FABRIC, SAFETY PINS
2024
Utilizing an ancient Jewish mourning custom of tearing one’s clothes, often contemporarily practiced by wearing torn black cloth attached with a safety pin, I explore repression and expression of grief and whose lives are considered mournable in the aftermath of October 2023 in Israel/Palestine.
Music, film, animation, installation, participatory
2018-2024
Music and film become the container for the artist's quest to recover the stories and strengths of their Jewish ancestors who migrated from Romania to Minneapolis at the turn of the 20th century.
"Fragments" challenges linear space-time to illuminate the past through the present and invite the audience into the questions:
Can anything truly be lost?
How do we remember what's been forgotten?
&
What if the fragments are enough?
“// held //” is a meditation on intimacy and longing, wrapping and unwrapping, and finding a constant relationship in uncertain times. Through the ancient Jewish ritual of tefillin (a morning practice of binding sacred text to one’s body with leather), I ask the questions: how do we access intimacy in times of isolation? Can intimacy with Gd be fully realized without human or more-than-human contact? What are the marks left on us by relationships or experiences, and what happens when they fade? As a genderqueer person who grew up without access to this ritual, I hope my expression will inspire and empower others who have been kept out explicitly or implicitly to explore the power for connection that this embodied ritual holds.
What is Shabbat Shirah?
On Shabbat Shirah (שירה שבת” / Shabbat of Song”), we read the story of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea in a climatic moment of exodus from mitzrayim (מצרים ,Egypt). Science and midrash (מדרש , rabbinic story) tell us that in the skies above, a mass migration of birds joined the path of the Israelites as they made their annual journey from their Winter homes in Africa to their Summer breeding grounds. The rebbes teach that as we reached the shore and lifted our voices in the celebratory Song of the Sea (הים שירת) , the birds sang with us. Some say they joined in our song; others say it was their songs that inspired ours.
On Shabbat Shirah, in honor of the birds who shared in our moment of exaltation, we set out offerings of food or seeds for our avian neighbors as a minhag (מנהג ,custom) to remember and honor our kinship.
This zine is an invitation to remember and reawaken our ancestral relationships with birds.
May it serve.
attributions
poetry and drawings by Kohenet Riv Shapiro
essays and invocation by Shlomo Pesach
dedications
Dedicated to Batikletcawi and Huchin, Konhomtara Pomo and Chochenyo Ohlone Lands. dedicated to our teachers, human and more-than-human. dedicated to queer decolonial futures. dedicated to dawn Laguna walks and idle rose garden afternoons. dedicated to the birds.
Bo’u Nashir means “Come, Let’s Sing!”
The Minnesota JCC’s Bo’u Nashir program is a series of Jewish communal music experiences in the Twin Cities that connects our diverse community through song and story, roots into Jewish musical traditions from across the diaspora, and celebrates local, contemporary Jewish music. Riv founded Bo’u Nashir in 2023 as the Minnesota JCC’s Director of Jewish Arts & Culture.
