Is it possible today to identify as both Jewish and German? What challenges, necessities, but also special creative spaces does a life in Germany - where Jewish culture and religion are still barely represented - entail for Jews? How can they cope with their own conflict with their burdened German nationality and how can they deal with it as part of the Jewish community? What potential and opportunities arise from the combination of being German and Jewish?

Ariel Reichman and Jackie Grassmann confront the complexity of these questions and the heterogeneity of the answers with a method that has characterized their long-standing friendship - personal dialogue. They conduct intensive interviews with German Jews who have to (re)find their identity.
Working with individual stories counteracts stereo-typing, assertions of general validity and any semblance of closure.

The artistic formulation is characterized by the fragmentary and processual as well as the dialogue. At the center of BECOMING GEWISH is a lecture performance: Jackie Grassmann and Ariel Reichman will talk about their own history as well as other ways of dealing with the tension between German and Jewish identity in three evenings of exhibition talks with performative elements.

In the exhibition, works on canvas, in which central passages from the interviews are incorporated, refer to the individual stories and concepts of identity. At the same time, they also form specific and unifying characteristics of this new Jewish identity, without repeating the usual markers of Judaism. The reassembling, re-finding of Jewish culture, religion and identity in the German context and beyond is also formulated in the floor installation, which consists of fragments of the Star of David.
The installation also includes seedlings of Tradescantia zebrina, a fast-rooting and offshoot-forming ornamental plant that is known outside Germany as the "Wandering Jew". Visitors can take them home with them and pass them on - into society.

Dialogue remains essential. BECOMING GEWISH often points out that it is not only central, but also obvious. The video work "And it's God who loves whiskey", which can be seen during the lecture performances in the Wedinghausen Monastery and afterwards until October 31 in the Propsteikirche St. Laurentius, takes up the motif of the mikvah, a ritual immersion bath. The new beginning, the transition, the transformation or confrontation of one's own person, which is accomplished by immersion in or washing with water, is an element shared by almost all religions and makes the existential nature of this ritual visible.

The artists would like to thank the following people for their trust and commitment: Alexander Green, Olaf Kühnemann, Noam, Leonie Otten, Johannes van Suntum, as well as Josephine Burkart, Anneliese Ostertag, Shelley Tootell and Eliza Posny.