A Synagogue Floating Above Venice

Launching a giant floating synagogue into the skies above Venice is likely to stir up some emotion, for better or worse. And on 16 July, Anna Kamyshan, a Ukrainian-Jewish artist and architect, is doing just that, when her Biennale-approved project will rise 45 metres over the Venetian Lagoon.

Titled Nabatele, it comprises a helium-filled double-layer aerostat (in layman's terms, a giant balloon) made to look like a shtetl synagogue sitting on a giant rock. The 12-metre-tall, 100-kg work is partly inspired by René Magritte's 1959 The Castle of the Pyrenees painting. Made from mixed media, it will be anchored to a platform on the water with a series of ropes, and will either drift gently in the breeze or rest on the water if the wind blows too strong.

‘Nabatele aims to bring a new level of visibility, recognition, and representation of Jewish culture, heritage and identity – both to the world at large and to Jewish communities themselves – which feels especially urgent today, at a moment marked by increasing polarisation, fear and hostility,’ the project notes read. ‘In this context, Nabatele aims to stand as a powerful symbol of hope, resilience and continuity for the global Jewish community.’

The origins of the installation’s name draw on the Hebrew word nabat, a call to attention in moments of danger, and softened by the Yiddish -ele, a suffix that means ‘little’, or acts as a term of endearment. As Kamyshan tells The Art Journal, the work therefore becomes "a quiet, almost silent signal… present, steady and persistent”. The synagogue’s windows will be illuminated to echo the ner tamid, a special lamp symbolising the eternal flame that hangs in every synagogue, offering “inner light as a response to the turbulence and uncertainty of our time”, she says.

Nabatele is part of the Venice Biennale's Collateral Events programme, which includes independently funded exhibitions and projects selected by the biennale's curatorial team. They are staged outside the Giardini and the Arsenale, where the national pavilions are located.

In 2024, Yiddishland Pavilion, an independent non-national project founded by Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks, invited Kamyshan to create a project for the second edition of the Yiddishland Pavilion to take place alongside the 19th Venice Biennale of Architecture. First presented as an AI-generated video, Kamyshan's The Castle of Yiddishland later transformed into Nabatele before being chosen as one of Venice's collateral events that, according to the artist "advances Yiddishland as a shared platform for artists across geographies connected not by territory but by language and culture". It first emerged in Venice in 2022 and has returned in evolving forms ever since.

Fiks tells The Art Journal that the curatorial impulse behind Nabatele was never about fixed identity or borders. “The whole idea of Yiddishland is to think beyond nation-state logic,” he says. “We are interested in what happens when identity is not tied to territory, but to movement, memory and language.” Veits adds that the biennale became a natural site for this question precisely because of its structure. “You have all these national pavilions,” she says. “So it is already a system built on borders. We wanted to interrupt that logic, even gently, by proposing something that does not sit inside it comfortably.”

She describes Nabatele as deliberately unstable in meaning as well as form. “It is not trying to represent a state or a flag,” she says. “It is more like a condition. Something floating, something that refuses to be pinned down.”

Kamyshan says she found herself asking how “a country [Yiddishland]... that never existed and probably will never exist” could be represented at the biennale, where participation is organised around national pavilions. “The idea began with a shadow,” she explains. “I imagined making something that would float in the sky so that people would first encounter its shadow moving across the city, almost like a passing cloud. Honestly, it doesn't even feel like the idea was mine. It simply arrived. It was almost as though the concept was downloading into my mind.”

Artist and architect Anna Kamyshan. Photo: Tea Monselesan and Fanni Baranyi

The project, which is supported by the Montreal Jewish Museum, also became entwined with Kamyshan's own search for identity after Russia's invasion of Ukraine: “I was going through my own identity crisis because of the war. Questions of Jewish identity eventually became an answer to many of the questions I was asking myself.”

Given Israel's demolition of Gaza in the wake of the October 7 Hamas-led attacks, it’s unlikely everyone will welcome the prospect of a massive synagogue floating above Venice. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the biennale's president, has already sparked a backlash by welcoming the Russian and Israeli pavilions to this year's exhibition. Aside from dominating the biennale's press coverage, there were several protests outside both pavilions and the biennale's international jury quit just days before the opening, saying it would not give awards to countries whose leaders were facing charges of war crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. Scores of artists and curators also signed open letters condemning the presence of both states.

Earlier in April, the European Union also pulled €2 million (£1.7m) of funding from the biennale, while various politicians, including Italy's culture minister, boycotted the opening.

Buttafuoco, a former right-wing journalist who once led the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) party, was always going to be a controversial pick for president. A few days before the Biennale opened its doors on 9 May, Buttafuoco said at a conference that ‘exclusion can only satisfy the ego’, and that banning countries would go against the biennale's mission to be ‘the place where the world comes together’. Whatever stance he decided to take on Russia and Israel was always going to cause political concern: if he had tried to blacklist the two states, he would have still been accused of politicising the Biennale. His office didn't reply when The Art Journal asked whether, like the Russian and Israeli pavilions, Nabatele could ignite protests.

Kamyshan says she isn't worried about how the installation will be received, although there is “a bitter feeling because there is so much hatred at the moment”.

“My original intention was to create something that encourages complexity, something that challenges black-and-white thinking. What worries me is that, instead, people may respond with even more polarisation”, she says. 

She recalls speaking to one curator who immediately told her: ‘You're putting the Israeli flag in the sky!?’“I asked her where she saw an Israeli flag. First of all, it isn't a flag. Second, the project isn't Israeli. I'm a Ukrainian Jew.”

Kamyshan says assumptions about Jewish identity have become increasingly simplistic: “Being Jewish doesn't mean being Israeli. Being Israeli doesn't necessarily mean supporting Netanyahu. These are completely different things. As human beings, we naturally simplify the world because it requires less energy. That's biology. But we also have the ability to think more deeply. That is really all I'm asking people to do: use a little more energy to embrace complexity instead of flattening everything into simple categories.”

Politics are not the only obstacle. The project has also presented a formidable engineering and logistical challenge, with components being manufactured in Spain and Germany, engines supplied from Denmark, software programmed in Berlin and an engineering team based in the UK.  “When I first approached experienced people in the field, many simply told me to forget about it,” Kamyshan says. “Some didn't even want to discuss the idea because they thought it was impossible.”

UK-based company Aerotrope was tasked with designing the project. At one stage, the original design proved incapable of flying at its intended scale and had to be completely re-engineered, adding significantly to the project's cost. Structural recalculations, material adjustments and repeated wind testing forced the team to rethink almost every aspect of the aerostat. Kamyshan is still raising funds, with some donors waiting until after the launch before making further commitments. 

Despite the setbacks, she insists the installation will be airborne. She would not reveal the total budget of the project, but it eclipses the cost of Yiddishland’s previous Venice appearances.

“It will happen,” she says.

Nabatele is also deeply personal. Kamyshan says she has spent much of her life feeling she belonged somewhere else, moving between cities and languages that constantly reshaped how she was seen. “When I lived in Lviv, people judged me because I spoke Russian. Then I moved to Kharkiv, where I was viewed differently again. After that I moved to Moscow, where I was considered Ukrainian. When I eventually returned to Kyiv, I was seen as someone arriving from Moscow.”

The experience has changed how she thinks about identity. "I've decided not to tie my identity to any one piece of land. I want to remain free. My roots aren't in geography. They're my values,” she adds.  For Yiddishland, this sense of displacement is not incidental but foundational to the project’s logic. Fiks says, “We are not interested in identity as something fixed or owned. We are interested in identity as something that moves, that changes shape depending on where you are standing,” Vate adds, “Nabatele is not asking to be understood in one way. It is asking to remain open, even unstable.”

She continues: “If there is a political dimension, it is not in the form of a statement. It is in the refusal to simplify.”

For now, though, Kamyshan’s attention is fixed on Venice. The technical rehearsals, weather windows and final assembly in the lagoon all hang over the final phase of preparation, as the project moves from concept into physical presence above the water. She hopes visitors will respond first with curiosity. “The floating synagogue is intentionally childlike,” she says. “I want children to point at it and say, 'Look! How is that flying?’”

The plan is to position Nabatele as a travelling installation that would continue after Venice on a proposed international tour across Canada and the US.  “Today's world is living through a kind of darkness. I wanted this project to bring light into that darkness.”