The House of Life (2017), a large-scale, multi-channel video installation by artist Hadassa Goldvicht, explores themes of personal and collective memory through the ever-changing reality of the Jewish community of Venice. Presented in conjunction with the 57th Venice Biennale, the project was on view at the Palazzo Querini Stampalia Museum, Venice, under the curation of Amitai Mendelsohn, Senior Curator, Head of the David Orgler Department of Israeli Art at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Oscillating between life, death, myth, and art, this major work explores recurring themes in Goldvicht’s artistic practice. Goldvicht’s work often takes as its subject intimate conversations with members of a community or institution, unraveling language and gesture to reveal socially and politically charged content. The House of Life began as an exploration of Venice’s Jewish community through personal conversations with its members when Goldvicht was an artist-in-residence at Beit Venezia, a Cultural Jewish Foundation in Venice. These conversations evoked deep emotional responses that spoke to the city’s struggle. Through Izzo, who introduced her to the city’s Jewish cemeteries, Goldvicht began to see the plight of these specific sites as an allegory for the struggles of the city itself.

On film and through the space, Izzo leads the viewers, like the Greek mythological figure Charon, on a voyage through the cemetery and its turbulent history. Erasing the border between life and death, he guides visitors to a place where the dead protect the living and the living protect the dead.

As a whole, The House of Life offers an astute observation of the city of Venice—which is the only major city in the world that had a larger permanent population during the Middle Ages than it has today. Through the narrative of one small corner of Venice and one man’s life work, the exhibition becomes a poetic and abstract allegory through which viewers examine the fading historical memory of Venice itself. Like the city, the ancient cemeteries remain beautiful and fascinating places; but, behind the facades they are in fact hollow, as many of the headstones no longer serve their intended purpose. Throughout the piece, Izzo speaks of death—of the cemetery grounds he oversees, of his pet tortoises that he embalms, of the burial plots left for the remaining Jewish population in Venice—effortlessly and fearlessly transporting himself between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Like Izzo’s work at the cemetery, The House of Life—by its very nature as a work of art that will live on beyond the life of its subject—fights against death, creating a quiet space outside of time in which to meditate on the life of the individual and his lasting personal effect on this place.