Georg Kolbe Museum Berlin: Noa Eshkol: Triple rediscovery

This exhibition is incredibly topical. On the 100th birthday of Noa Eshkol, the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin is introducing the work of the choreographer, textile artist and dance theorist who was born on February 28, 1924 in Kibbutz Degania in Palestine. The title, “No Time to Dance,” could hardly be more current. The artist honored here was an eminently political person. She dealt with the Nazis’ war of conquest and annihilation, the Holocaust and the anti-fascist resistance, but at the same time also with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

When the exhibition was planned, the main aim was to rescue the Israeli artist’s complex work from oblivion. In the meantime, however, individual works have a signal effect. In her tapestry “Palestinian Vase in a Window,” an Arabic keffiyeh is the central element. The red and white patterned cloth, spread out as a square, marks a window in which further fabric scraps recreate a vase and flowers. The fact that an Israeli woman uses a Palestinian scarf for work is already a strong statement. At that time like today.

Noa Eshkol began working with textiles when the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973. Until then she worked primarily as a choreographer. But: “Now is not the time to dance,” she decided at the time. A dancer in her ensemble was drafted into the army. And so Eshkol began collecting scraps of fabric and putting them together into dynamic compositions that are often abstract. Similar to their dance interpretations and productions. At the same time, the large-format and colorful tapestries contrast with her more minimalist choreographies. But of course she always resorted to musical principles, worlds of experience and motifs in her material creations, such as a fugue.

Some carpets have figurative elements. In addition to the work with the Kufiya, this applies to “Arab on her minimalist choreographies with Birds” and “Birds in the Negev”. Birds with outstretched wings sail above the modest houses of an Arabian village. »Birds in the Negev« shows entire swarms of feathered creatures gliding across the desert in a sophisticated composition that suggests three-dimensionality.

There is always a lot of movement in Noa Eshkol’s textile pictures. This is of course not surprising. Because she lived the dance, lived for the dance, was completely a dancer. Together with the architect Abraham Wachmann, she developed a sophisticated system for recording dance movements. Every rotation and every bend of the limbs was meticulously recorded. The counterpart to this can be found on individual carpets. “The Eshkol-Wachman movement notation,” Noa Eshkol herself once commented, “is a thinking tool that can teach people the art of observation, that is, encourage them to strive for the highest level of seeing.”

The museum in Berlin’s Westend also offers insights into Noa Eshkol’s first calling, dance, which she filled with political and historical content. In 1953, for example, she created a mass choreography that, on the tenth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, recalled the suffering and despair, but also the heroic spirit of resistance and will to resist, of the Jews who were commemorated by the Nazis to die in the extermination camps. The exhibition shows excerpts from the original choreography, but also a re-enactment by Ome Kieger in 2020. It is interesting that Noa Eshkol drew on compositions by the pioneer of electronic music, Herbert Brün, when appreciating the ghetto uprising. Traumatic history is linked here with mechanical modernity. The motif of machines or mechanized processes as not only useful but also monstrous and murderous can also be encountered in the textile works.

Noa Eshkol’s work deserves to be rediscovered beyond current acclaim. The choreographer, who died in Cholon, Israel in 2007, was a master of concentration and intensity. She almost completely dispensed with costumes and props, relying solely on the power of movement. The Eshkol-Wachmann movement notation, which she helped develop, has aesthetic qualities in addition to its purely practical function and appears timeless and contemporary. Her preoccupation with textiles, which has long received less attention, fits seamlessly into today’s renewed, growing appreciation of textile art as an independent art genre.

The Georg Kolbe Museum has achieved a real trick with this exhibition. Especially since the honorees’ close connection to the museum’s namesake, Georg Kolbe, is striking at his former place of work. Sculptor and dancer alike dedicated themselves to movement. With one difference: While Noa Eshkol celebrated movements on stage, Georg Kolbe froze them in his sculptures.

»Noa Eshkol. No Time to Dance”, until August 25, 2024, Georg Kolbe Museum, Sensburger Allee 25, 14055 Berlin, open daily from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed on Tuesdays, admission 8 euros, reduced price 5 euros.

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