Water Series
Book of Yona Ecology Rain / Bechukotai Troubled Waters
The Immersion Series is my exploration of the Jewish custom of immersion oneself in water.
The works date back to when I first started taking up a serious study of Jewish texts.
Ritual immersion is the total submersion of the body in a pool of water, and is part of a traditional procedure for conversion to Judaism. It signifies the transition from non-Jew to Jew. Other immersion ceremonies may center on lifetime events such as preparing for major holidays, birthdays, etc.
After I got married I attended the mikvah once a month as per Jewish marriage traditions. Some non-orthodox women see this purification ritual as archaic, but I always found it calming and uplifting. In my extremely busy NYC life I welcomed that mandate of having to take one evening a month just for me. The elaborate preparations (soaking in a tub and additional grooming) in a spa-like environment were a meditative experience. The submersion in the pool of water, floating weightlessly, followed by the mikvah attendant declaring me “kosher”, often left me in a state of bliss.
The three Immersion paintings portray my mikvah experiences: the bliss of weightlessness (I), the reference to a marriage ritual (II), and the feeling of being spiritually elevated (III).
The existence of a mikveh is so important in Judaism that an Orthodox community is required to construct a mikveh before building a synagogue. If no funds are available, one must sell Torah scrolls to pay for the construction.
Immersion I
Immersion II
Living Waters is a series in progress, addressing the massive plastic pollution killing our oceans and its sea creatures.
The series will feature interactive installations with embedded videos.
One small component, the Tzedek Box Globe, is exhibited at the Heller Museum, NYC, until June 15, 2023.
Crab in plastic bag, 24 inches diameter, acrylic on canvas
Turtle in plastic netting (UNFINISHED)
Foedraal Tzedek Globe - The world seen through the eyes of fish
Turtle trapped in netting and Crab in plastic bag are two works-in-progress.
Foedraal, Dutch for “vessel”, is shaped like a globe "according to fish": the land masses are blotted out at the centers. This work is a call to repair the (sea) world.
The annual dumping of non-degradable plastic in our oceans is detrimental to the environment. The concept of bal tashchit in Jewish law forbids the gratuitous destruction of natural resources.
The slot where we add our slip of paper, in Antarctica, is a narrow opening, accepting only scripts the size of fortune cookies. We write our contributions and promises on “fortune” papers, hoping their mazal will aid us in the endeavor to make the earth plastic-free.
The work was created for the 2023 Heller Museum’s exhibition Tzedek Boxes: Justice Shall You Pursue. Contemporary artists offer their vision for the Tzedek box, a new ceremonial object for a new ritual aimed at encouraging us to answer the Jewish call for justice. When we complete a meaningful act of social justice, we write a diary entry about the experience and insert it into a Tzedek Box. This ritual regularly prompts us to reflect on what we have learned -- and what we still need to do -- as we seek to build a more just world.
The Book of Yona is an interactive series which blends the coming-to-America stories of artists Katarzyna Kozera and Yona Verwer’s lives with that of the biblical prophet Jonah / Yona. The art touches on issues of identity, conversion, immigration, and heritage.
Some of the works feature “augmented reality” images, visible on the viewer’s smart phone. See a simulation here.
Click on the images for full view
Hebben Olla Vogala 1, 24 x 36 inches, Acrylic and digital on canvas, 2022
Hebben Olla Vogala 2, 36 x 24 inches, Acrylic on canvas, 2022
The Book of Yona 15, 36 x 24 inches, Acrylic paint & digital on canvas
The Book of Yona 6, 36 x 24 inches, Acrylic paint & digital on canvas + augmented reality
The Book of Yona 5, 36 x 24 inches, Acrylic paint on canvas + augmented reality.
The Book of Yona 8, 24 x 36 inches, Acrylic paint & digital on canvas
The sculptural paintings Blessings and Curses are based on texts in the bible / Torah; in this case they focus on rain. Blessings, curses, and rain are all open to interpretation; while good for one, they may be bad for another. These paintings show the process of opening ourselves: the more we open ourselves to divine energy coming down to us, the more we are open to positive interpretations of events.
Curses
Blessings
Troubled Waters was exhibited in 2019 at the Reinwardt Academy in Amsterdam, as part of the event Art Stations of the Cross.
Troubled Waters, 2019, digital images, acrylic paint, augmented reality and sound
The installation is a collaboration between Yona Verwer, a Dutch-born New York artist and Katarzyna Kozera, with sound by composers Alon Nechushtan (from his “Dark Forces”) and Dan Schwartz (excerpts from “February Strike”), video edits by Masha Norman.
The focus of the work is on Amsterdam’s current and past problems regarding imprisoned women. At the moment many women are still kept captive and forced to work in prostitution, while during World War II many Jewish women were deported to concentration camps.
The left large panel shows women in the Holocaust; the panel to its right suggests contemporary young women in captivity.
The flanking panels are maps of the Red Light District, and the former Jewish neighborhood.
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Viewing the augmented reality videos
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Detail
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AR on the iPad
The Times of Israel:
“...Yona Verwer and Katarzyna Kozera’s take on the Book of Jonah, is a pivotal moment for Verwer as a Jew who converted from Catholicism and left her home in the Netherlands for New York.
Her Jonah is in a submarine in New York’s East River, and she takes that up another notch with augmented reality, having viewers use smartphone or tablets to hone in on a spot in the painting, which triggers a video embedded in the artwork, leading the viewer closer to the layered narrative.”
Contact Magazine:
“... Her most recent installation, in collaboration with Polish-born artist Katarzyna Kozera, culminates years of probing the passageways between cultures and continents. A play on her name and the Biblical figure of Jonah, “The Book of Yona” transposes the Biblical whale to a submarine charting the Atlantic and arriving in New York’s East River. The submergence of the submarine also serves as metaphor for immersion in the mikveh as part of the conversion process.
The paintings are interactive, accompanied by images and videos accessible via smartphones to offer additional layers and gleanings that enhance the viewing experience: The artist as a toddler submerged in water and as an adult at a New York shoreline, interspersed with Hebrew passages from The book of Jonah. Taken together, the multimedia series grapples with issues of identity, upheaval, migration, renewal, and personal and collective encounters with Judaism as it charts two women’s paths from old worlds to new”.
Full article here.
About the art series “Book of Yona”
This series blends the immigrant stories of Katarzyna Kozera and myself with the biblical story of Jonah the prophet.
They echo my own journey from Europe to New York, from Catholicism to Judaism. Conversion requires ritual immersion, a total submersion of the body in a pool of water, to symbolize a change-of-soul. The water symbolizes birth as a Jew. In these paintings these “living” waters are New York’s East River.
In some of the works one sees my own eyes above. Ori Z. Soltes wrote: ...”a contemporary underwater fish (a submarine) and the Brooklyn Bridge below; her story embedded beneath the immediately visible surface—and Katarzyna’s parallel journey from Poland to New York”.
The embedded videos, accessible to the viewer by Ipad or smartphone, add another dimension to this narrative.
The biblical story is about second chances, forgiveness, and redemption; humanity matters more than abstractions. Jonah's journey is our journey.
Rabbi Steven Bob, from his book “Jonah and the meaning of our lives”:
“We always want a second chance. We’d like everybody we did us wrong to give us another chance, but are we willing to give others a second chance? Not simply forgiving the people who wronged us, but trusting them again in circumstances in which they had previously disappointed us.....”
“Nineveh raises broader questions: How do we view people different from ourselves?...”
“Do we sometimes look at “others” as threatening? Can we accept that people of other religious communities can be in a proper relationship with the same God we serve, even though they use different images and tell different stories about that God’s connection to humanity?”
More about the biblical book of Yonah here.