The Words That Fit My Mouth
The current Yiddishland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was inaugurated on May 7, 2026, by the exhibition The Words That Fit My Mouth. It brings together artists whose works engage with embodied translation, interpretation and multilingual transtemporalities.
Responding to the Jewish tradition of reading and commentary, the exhibition, which will remain open till May 31, approaches texts not as fixed containers of meaning, but as spaces shaped through contradiction, repetition and reimagining. Meaning emerges through layered encounters in which divergent voices remain in relation to one another rather than being reconciled. It includes works that move between languages – Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic and others – by Arndt Beck, Liliana Farber, Laila Abd Elrazaq and Masha Shprayzer, accompanied by a series of performances by the artist, choreographer and singer Eliana Pliskin Jacobs.
Bearing the same title – The Words That Fit My Mouth – the current Yiddishland Pavilion itself will remain open until September 16, 2026. It is a conceptual, independent, non-national art space initiated in 2022 by the artist Yevgeniy Fiks and curator Maria Veits. Since 2025, shaped by both historic and contemporary Yiddish experiences, the pavilion has been situated in the Ghetto Vecchio, the historical Jewish quarter of the city. Its third iteration explores Yiddishland as an imagined territory constituted through language, translation, memory and voices.
Photos by Arndt Beck and Filippo Molena