Walter Benjamin: Exilic Archive

For Frieze magazine

‘My wing is poised to beat,’ wrote the philosopher Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin on the occasion of the latter’s 29th birthday in 1921, ‘but I would gladly return home / were I to stay to the end of days /
 I would still be this forlorn.’ The poem, ‘Greetings from Angelus’, with its ambiguous allusions to loss and home, forms a subliminal narrative for the exhibition ‘Walter Benjamin: Exilic Archive’, the first show in Israel to focus on the avid curiosity around Benjamin’s work and his growing reputation as a Judaic scholar. 

The exhibition comprises eight sections, each highlighting an aspect of Benjamin’s biography and work, beginning with ‘Berlin Childhood’, proceeding via ‘The Arcades Project’ and culminating in ‘Materialism and Revolution’. Each section contains vitrines with a range of ephemera from these periods, including holiday snapshots, newspaper articles and postcards. The vitrines are interspersed with artworks by mainly Israeli artists, including Uri Aran, Avner Ben-Gal and Dor Guez. An accompanying booklet decodes the unlabelled archival fragments but, unfortunately, there is scant information about the artworks themselves, and few thematic connections between the works and Benjamin’s ephemera.

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920, 24 x 32 cm, India ink, coloured chalk, and brown wash on paper