Robert Yerachmiel Snyderman, MFA
he/him, Assistant Professor of Socially Engaged Art
About
PhD, Contemporary Art, Simon Fraser University, in-progress
MFA, Literary Art, Brown University, 2012
BFA, Writing for Media, Publication and Performance, Pratt Institute, 2009
Areas of Interest: art as direct action; site-based art; participatory art; installation art; performance art; experimental theatre and film; collective work; memory studies; critical local history; critical Jewish studies; aesthetics of solidarity; poetics.
Courses offered 2018-2023: FAIR 336V Durational Contemplation; FAIR 201 Artistic Research; FAIR 381G Berlin: City of Remembering and Forgetting (with Dr. Yanara Friedland); FAIR 336V Collective Practice: Pickett House; FAIR 336V Walking in Traumatic Time; FAIR 336V Constructing Interventions; FAIR 202A Installing Memory; AMST 206 The Jewish American Experience: Radical Jewish Aesthetics; AMST 206 The Jewish American Experience: Local Conflict, Global Memory; AMST 397 Contemporary Issues in Jewish American Studies: Antisemitism, Imperialism, and Totalitarianism.
ROBERT YERACHMIEL SNIDERMAN is a fourth generation Ashkenazi settler from places in the traditional territory of the Lenape diaspora, with ancestral ties to eradicated Jewish communities in Warsaw, Jaroslaw and Rzeszów (PL), Chișinău (MLD), Dnipro (UKR), and Seirijai (LITH). As an interdisciplinary artist, curator, poet, and organizer he constructs art interventions, plays, films, installations, exhibitions, social and public projects, and texts, often in collaboration with other artists and specific communities. His contributions establish difficult situations for durational contemplation and vernacular rites, manifesting a quiet language of intense proximity over time by radicalizing accidents, anxieties, and memory.
Recent works include the performance archive Lost in Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee (2018); the marionette film Night Herons (2021) made with Joanna Rajkowska; the public project Wierzba Estery / Esther’s Willow (2018-ongoing) with Katarzyna Sala and Marta Sala; and السماء إلى الصعود بيان Flight Manifesto (ongoing), a serial walk and sonic archive on the Nooksack River, in long distance collaboration with Palestinian sound artist Dirar Kalash and on the Nooksack River and shifting group of activists, artists, and scholars based in Whatcom County, including Cascadia Deaf Nation, Brel Froebe, and Samara Hayley Steele. These and past works were supported by institutions such as Bruna Press + Archive; Chinati Foundation; Corridor Project Space (NL); German Academic Exchange Service (GE); FestivALT (PL); House of Taswir (GE); Institut für Kunst im Kontext, Universität der Künste Berlin (GE); Irena and Mieczysaw Mazaraki Museum (PL); Jewish History Museum + Holocaust History Center of Tucson; Municipal Center of Culture, Sports, and Recreation of Chrzanów (PL); Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (PL); Ontological-Hysteric Theater; Polish Institute Vienna (AT); The Eye Never Sleeps '22 (PL); steirischer herbst '20 (AT); Western Gallery, Western Washington University; and Zachęta National Gallery of Art (PL).
Sniderman's visual and performance art, poems, art criticism, and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, monographs, and exhibition catalogues including Visible Binary (2022), Zachęta Online Magazine (2021), Paranoia TV Catalogue (2021), The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (2020), The Offing (2019), The Volta (2015), and Emergency Index Vol. 3 (2013). He is an editor at the Jewish art and politics journal PROTOCOLS and a PhD candidate at the School for the Contemporary Arts of Simon Fraser University where he is finishing his practice-based dissertation, Walking in Ethnocidal Places.