Yevgeniy Fiks is an artist and exhibition organizer, who developed the concept of Yiddish Cosmos and wrote an artistic manifesto on contemporary Yiddish art.
Born in 1972 in Moscow, he has been living and working in New York since 1994.

Yevgeniy Fiks

In the early 1980s, Fiks became interested in Yiddish, which he had heard from birth, and asked his grandmother to teach him this language. Later, while living in America, Fiks created his own concept of Yiddish as a “cosmic” language, capable of connecting heaven and earth, everyday life and fantastic utopia, Jewish and global culture. In 2018, his exhibition Yiddish Cosmos was held for the first time in New York and later on took place in his hometown, Moscow.

In his artistic manifesto, Fiks reflects on the growing popularity of Yiddish among the younger generation of artists, writers and scientists, on the special place of this language in contemporary avant-garde art. Among other examples, he cites the work of the Afro-American Yiddishist Anthony Russell and the Yiddish translation of the play Waiting for Godot by the Irish classic Samuel Beckett. The artist emphasizes the uniqueness of Yiddish culture as a bridge capable of uniting traditional ethnicity with universal human ideals, the past with the present and the “cosmic” future.

In 2022, the famous Venice Biennale, one of the largest international art exhibitions, opened the Yiddishland Pavilion. The curators of this exhibit are Yevgeniy Fiks and Maria Veits.