Viktoria Wagner
Zion Box
​
​
Zion Box is a drawer full of with tiny things, photographs, souvenirs and memories.
The Zion Box is about remembrance, about the souvenirs around us, which wake memories of the past, accompanying us through the times in the present as well as in the future.
The exhibition Zion Box commemorates miracle deliverances and survivals of the Jewish community and individual stories in the course of time, like the Pesach or the Shoah.
Most of the Jewish festivals celebrate the Jewish survival over oppression, the Purim being one of them.
Purim is a great miracle and a very special holiday, a time of prizes, noisemakers, costumes and treats.
Emil Fuer created his special boxes, drawings, gauche paintings and sculptures for the festival of Purim.
He brings the Purim’s spirit in his peculiar point of view with his usual irony and humor. He puts familiar things, figures, and ideas into a surprising, atypical context and individually reinterprets them. The works initiate a mental game with their viewers, encouraging them to find hidden connections and personal interpretations.
With the Zion Boxes Emil Fuer links together past and present while evoking the spirituality of the Eastern and Mid-European Jewish cultures and the spirit of the Shtetl. Old photographs, lace, musical machines, gadgets, tiny charming figures, knick-knacks and accessories evoke the atmosphere of bygone days, individual stories of unknown people who could have been even our grandparents, relatives, acquaintances. Sensitively composed requisites of memory and remembrance, where near and far, familiar and unfamiliar present at the same time.
The extraordinary, grotesque mezuzot and other sculptures refer to the custom of masquerade in costume, and the wearing of masks, which alludes to hidden aspect of the miracle of Purim. Just like the gauche paintings and drawings, which call up the Purim Spiel, a historical stage play that also attempts to convey the saga of the Purim story, but in some parts of Eastern Europe, the Purim plays had evolved into broad-ranging satires with music and dance will bring cheer and comic relief to an audience celebrating the day.
Emil’s works always highly seasoned with humor, self-irony, and grotesqueness, which help to overcome the obstacles and difficulties of life. Despite its deeper meanings, his artworks primarily represent and celebrate the joy of life and the will to live, thus proclaiming Purim’s cheerful atmosphere.
​
Victoria Wagner, art historian
London, 2011
