Mikael Levin
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Mikael Levin (born 1954) is an American artist who explores in his work our conceptions of place, identity, and temporarily Levin was the recipient of a
Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...
in 2025 and has been exhibited widely in the US and in Europe, including solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum, Paris, 2010, the Berardo Collection Museum, Lisbon, 2009, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, 2003, the International Center of Photography, New York, 1997, and Fundación Mendoza, Caracas, 1980. His work was included in the Venice Biennale in 2003.


Biography

Mikael Levin is the son of American novelist Meyer Levin and French novelist
Tereska Torrès Tereska Torrès (born Tereska Szwarc; 3 September 192020 September 2012) was a French writer known for the 1950 book '' Women's Barracks'', the first "original paperback bestseller." In 2008 historians credited the republished book as the first p ...
. His grandfather was the
Ecole de Paris The School of Paris (, ) refers to the French and émigré artists who worked in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. The School of Paris was not a single art movement or institution, but refers to the importance of Paris as a centre o ...
artist
Marek Szwarc Marek Szwarc (9 May 1892 – 28 December 1958) was a painter and sculptor associated with the School of Paris (École de Paris), as well as with the Yiddish cultural avant-garde movement in Poland '' Yung-yidish''. Early years Marek Szwarc was b ...
. His older brother Gabriel Levin is a Jerusalem-based poet and translator. While growing up, Mikael and his family split their time between New York, Paris, and Israel. Levin is currently based on Long Island, New York.


Artistic career

The sequence of four projects described below, which stretch over some 30 years, are an example of the way Mikael Levin's work situates everyday scenes within the greater forces of our times, using photography’s observational qualities and unique temporality to take a longer view of the present. Levin''s photographs turn our awareness to how memory and identity intersect with place and time. In 1993, as the European Union started removing border controls between member states, Levin set out to mark the optimism of the era by photographing the newly decommissioned border crossings. French-American, he envisioned that European border-lines would soon be no more noticeable than state lines in the US. Levin recorded the various structures that constituted the border: control booths, customs houses, barriers, signage, also the in-between spaces, and related businesses such as cafes, hotels, currency exchanges, and duty-free shops. The resulting selection of 90 photographs was presented in five large, hand-made albums. These were purchased and exhibited by the
Bibliothèque nationale de France The (; BnF) is the national library of France, located in Paris on two main sites, ''Richelieu'' and ''François-Mitterrand''. It is the national repository of all that is published in France. Some of its extensive collections, including bo ...
in a solo exhibition in 2003. Photographing borders in 1993 brought Mikael Levin to thinking of his father’s frequent crossings of those same borders at the close of the Second World War, when, as an American war correspondent, Meyer Levin followed the Allied advance into Germany. In ''War Story'' (1996), Mikael Levin used his father’s autobiography, ''In Search'', to retrace his father’s journey, photographing the sites his father described as he found them 50 years later. Setting out from Paris, Meyer Levin had followed the Allied advance eastward. As the journey progressed he encountered the concentration camps, the liberation of which he witnessed first hand. The camps became the central focus of Meyer Levin’s reporting. Accompanying Meyer Levin on their 1944-1945 journey was the French photographer
Éric Schwab Eric Schwab (1910–1977) was a French photographer, photojournalist and war correspondent. Starting in 1944 he worked for Agence France-Presse (AFP). In the 1950s and 1960s he was employed by several United Nations organizations such as WHO. In ...
. Schwab’s photographs, presumed lost, were located by Mikael Levin while researching ''War Story''. Incorporating them into his project, Levin’s journey 50 years later became not only one of comparing written descriptions to present-day scenes, but also of re-photographing sites photographed by Schwab. Levin has described ''War Story'' as an investigation of how photographs layer time over place. There was also a more personal level to this project; what Meyer Levin witnessed scarred him for the rest of his life. This project was a way for Mikael Levin to come to understand how those experiences had impacted his father. ''War Story'' was sponsored by the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, with support from DZ Bank (Frankfurt). It was exhibited extensively in the following years, first as the featured exhibition of Kunstfest Weimar in 1996, and then in such places as the
International Center of Photography The International Center of Photography (ICP) is a photography museum and school at 84 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. ICP's photographic collection, reading room, and archives are at Mana Contemporary in Jer ...
in New York (1997), Deutsches Filmmuseum (Frankfurt 1997), Haus am Kliestpark (Berlin, 1998), and Archives Nationales (Paris, 2003). Large selections from ''War Story'' are in the collections of the Jewish Museum in Berlin,
Whitney Museum The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...
and the
International Center of Photography The International Center of Photography (ICP) is a photography museum and school at 84 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. ICP's photographic collection, reading room, and archives are at Mana Contemporary in Jer ...
. Amongst a number of books that discuss this project, ''Spectral Evidence'', by Ulrich Baer, stands out for two chapters that discuss Levin’s work. While involved with ''War Story'' Levin became preoccupied with trying to understand how a horror such as the Holocaust could have possibly come about. Many historians have linked colonial practices and modernity as antecedents of the Holocaust. From his readings on this subject emerged his next project ''Notes from the Periphery'' (2003). In ''Notes from the Periphery'' (2003), which was presented in Venice Biennale of 2003, Levin presented three series of photographs, each done in a place linked to the Atlantic slave trade, and each focusing on an attribute of modernity’s conception of identity. His point was to draw attention to how modernity’s positivist idea of individual and social identity emerged hand in hand with the global commerce in human flesh, a system that brought some 12 million enslaved people to work and die the New World. His research on ''Notes from the Periphery'' led Levin to his next project, looking into the story of a branch of his family that had settled in Guinea-Bissau, further south along the coast of Africa. He realized that this family’s migration story over three generations encapsulated the turbulent eras of industrialization, colonialism, and post-colonialism; that it was a typical story of the struggles for betterment, and ultimately the defeated hopes, of the 20th century. It was also important to him as a modern Jewish story that atypically bypassed Zionism. The project he developed around this story, ''Cristina’s History'' (2007), consists of images made in the places where his relatives lived—in Poland, Portugal and Guinea-Bissau—accompanied by brief narratives situating their lives within the larger historical context of their time. ''Cristina’s History'' was first exhibited at Le Point du Jour, in Cherbourg, France in 2009. Later that same year the project was exhibited at the
Berardo Collection Museum The Berardo Collection Museum (in Portuguese: Museu Colecção Berardo) was a museum of modern and contemporary art in Belém, a district of Lisbon, Portugal. It was replaced by the Contemporary Art Museum - Centro Cultural de Belém in January ...
in Lisbon, and in 2010 it was shown at the Jewish Museum in Paris], where Levin was awarded the museum’s Prix Maratier. The complete set of images from the project was purchased in 2012 by the
Fonds national d'art contemporain The Fonds national d'art contemporain (FNAC; National Foundation for Contemporary Art) is a public collection of contemporary art in France. It does not hold exhibitions but acquires and stores works of art that it loans to museums, cultural instit ...
(France). In 2019 Levin started on Critical Places; 15 Sites of American Slave Rebellion, a project about how the rebellions of the enslaved are remembered (or not remembered) in the landscape. Through his experience of those places, as witnessed in his photographs, he marks them as critical places in a topography of historical consciousness, bringing forward how he see these rebellions still echoing in social patterns and economic structures. A series of exhibitions in venues associated with those rebellions followed, including at the South Slave Cabin Gallery of the Melrose, in Natchez, Mississippi, Staff Reports. (17 January 2024). "Critical Places: Sites of American Slave Rebellion photography exhibit opens at Melrose"
Natchez Democrat website
Retrieved 19 January 2024.
which was proximate to the Second Creek uprising that took place at  Cherry Grove Plantation in 1861. Other venues included the Boydern Gallery of Saint Mary’s College of Maryland, and the
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University The School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) is the international affairs and public policy school of Columbia University, a private Ivy League university located in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, New York City. SIPA offers Master of I ...
, New York.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Levin, Mikael 1954 births Living people People from Long Island 21st-century American artists Place of birth missing (living people)