“The Words That Fit My Mouth” Exhibition

Yiddishland is an independent conceptual pavilion founded in Venice in 2022 by artist Yevgeniy Fiks and curator Maria Veits. Since then, the project has taken place alongside the Venice Biennale. Unlike many official Biennale pavilions, however, it is not tied to national representation. It engages with the historical and contemporary experience of Yiddish culture and understands Yiddishland as a shared artistic space for creators working across different countries and cultural contexts.

In its third edition, Yiddishland Pavilion approaches Yiddishland as an imagined territory emerging through language, translation and voice. Here, Yiddish matters not only as a historical language, but also as a way of speaking about memory, belonging, artistic expression and connections between people, places and cultures.

The exhibition took place in the Jewish Ghetto of Venice — a site of immense historical and symbolic significance for the project and for European Jewry as a whole. This context was essential to Yiddishland Pavilion: contemporary art entered into dialogue not only with the Biennale’s international audience, but also with the history of Jewish presence in Venice, the memory of the place, and the question of how Jewish, diasporic and multilingual culture can speak today.