There’s an old Jewish joke about a guy emigrating to America. A friend tells him he’ll never make it in the USA with a Jewish name, so he picks a good gentile moniker. But when he gets to the border, it slips his mind. He says ‘Ach! Shoyn fergesin!’ (Yiddish for ‘I've forgotten!’). The official replies ‘Sean Ferguson, welcome to the United States of America’.
As artist and writer Joshua Leon shows in his Chisenhale exhibition, names are malleable things for Jews; signifiers that can be twisted and altered to allow you to better fit in, to integrate, to avoid the crushing pressure of antisemitic discrimination. Bob Dylan’s real name is Robert Zimmerman, Joey Ramone’s was Jeffrey Hyman, Kirk Douglas was Issur Danielovitch, and on and on. Leon’s grandfather was born Kurt Hutter, but in the programmes to accompany his musical performances (shown here behind yellowed glass) over the course of his career in the UK, he became Ken or Curtis, and when he left for Israel, he became David.
This nominative malleability is at the heart of Leon’s sparse show. There are two letters silhouetted in the window, an O and an E. Are they the missing pieces of the C, H and N on the front of the gallery? Did the former owner of this old veneer factory, Morris Cohen, delete the vowels? Why? To hide his jewishness? To fit into an unwelcoming society? To fly under the radar as fascism gripped 1940s Europe? What has been erased? What story is going untold?
A speaker plays a single isolated violin from an Elgar concerto, a lone voice, telling a story that was never meant to be heard.
The installation here doesn’t really work as an exhibition, it’s too empty, sparse, vast, it doesn’t give you enough. But the ideas are brilliant, moving, intimate. Leon’s archival instincts and academic thirst for truth lead to a powerful personal exploration of history and migration. He asks what it means to have a name, to hide, to choose a path, to integrate, to be rejected. The work has Jewish roots, but these are big universal questions filled with a silent pain that anyone can relate to, Cohens and Fergusons alike.
