17 + 24 September - Re-visiting Yochanan with Hannah Dawn Henderson

Re-visiting Yochanan is a two-part** reading workshop, led by artist Hannah Dawn Henderson, on the 17th and 24th of September, 19:00 – 20:30 at our new livingroom, Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat 30 in Amsterdam. 

The workshop traces a constellation of accounts from early rabbinic literature that recollect the life of Rabbi Yochanan, a 3rd-century Amora.* The workshop foregrounds the prismatic forms of otherness to which these accounts appear to gesture: Yochanan as a figure who is at once canonical and subaltern, central to rabbinic memory yet marked by vulnerability, bodily alterity, and at times limited agency. Particular attention will be given to the divergent narratives preserved across different sources, and the charged implications of such disjunctures. 

The workshop invites participants to ask what it might mean to remember our sages otherwise: to expand collective memory so that it can also hold those dimensions of rabbinic lives that do not readily align with normative frameworks of authority and legibility. Alongside extracts from the Talmud and related sources, we will seek resonances with contemporary biographical and theoretical writing on illness, grief, and queer experience, including Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory and Anne Boyer’s The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness.

Hannah Dawn Henderson is an artist, writer and researcher, based in The Hague, whose projects explore diasporic memory, interactions between institutional and immaterial archival sites, and somatic otherness. This workshop forms part of the art project project bruised flowers, and has been made possible with the support of het Mondriaan Fonds.

*An Amora: a rabbinic scholar and legal thinker, active approximately between 200 to 500 CE. The voices of the Amoraim form the basis of the Gemara, the analytical, polyphonic commentary on an earlier codification of Jewish law, known as the Mishnah.

**Because the second workshop follow from the first, you can join the second one only if you participated in the first workshop also.