2024
Multimedia installation, video performance, pomegranate ink print
In “Under Pressure”, I add my personal history and current experience to the accumulated symbology of the pomegranate. I am interested in the places where life and death are intertwined, how violence can activate power in the oppressed, and how those not in the direct line of fire can stay sustain solidarity.
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.
2020-2021 (HEBREW YEAR 5781)
Phenology “wheels” are interactive lunar calendars that aid our awareness of seasonal shifts through recording observations like sunrise and sunset time, temperature and weather, and plant and animal behavior. Kohenet Riv created a phenology wheel for each Hebrew month of 5781, often including great detail alongside illustrations of natural phenomena and interspecies kin.
2020
Embroidery, poetry, sound
Published in Deep Times Journal, 2020
Listen to the song recording by clicking the link above.
דַּיֵּנוּ
Origin: Hebrew
“It would have been enough for us”.
Context: A song sung on the Jewish holiday of Passover, recounting the miracle of liberation from the Narrow Place and celebrating each small miracle within.
Passover fell in the fourth week of shelter-in-place in the year 5780/2020.
Dear one,
I could tell you of my suffering, and keep telling you.
I could tell you of my wholeness, and keep telling you.
I want, I yearn, I long
and every day there’s something that gives me
reason to say: it’s enough, for today.
A new growth of poppies emerges after the rain.
The house finch sings on the telephone wire.
The neighbor plays the saxophone in the nearby park.
I list these moments of wholeness, of sufficiency,
recite them like a prayer.
Nearly five months have passed, and looking back
through lists of solace I’m faced
again with what I’ve lost, what I once held
close to my chest, cradling my “enough.”
And beneath that, a constancy,
a stream of contentment in
small moments,
shifting in form but insistent in
their message of belonging.
A friend holds my gaze from ten
feet away, and I am not alone.
The summer heat brings freckles
to my skin and stone fruit
drips its juice down my chin.
The toddler next door blows
bubbles from the front porch,
blows me a kiss.
If I can find today’s “dayenu” –
if I can be open to it
in spite of all that’s gone –
I have a raft on the river of my grief.
I think of you, and all you’ve lost.
All that you keep losing.
What remains?
Who remains?
Can that be enough,
for today?
With you,
Riv
