Joseph Sassoon Semah

I was born in Baghdad, Iraq (1948). From 1950 I grew up in Tel Aviv, Israel. My grandfather, Hacham/Rabbi Sassoon Kadoori was the president of the Jewish community in Baghdad, who preached tolerance between the various religious denominations.

My work is best described as a profound and wide-ranging exploration of the links between language and a man-made image. A scholar of many classical texts, I create my own conceptual and pictorial world as part of his quest, placing human beings at the centre of this world. I seek to understand people in the present day, in relation to communities with their own culture and history. My works stand in a long tradition of liberal humanistic thinking reaching from Baruch de Spinoza to the Frankfurter Schule.
Exile, hospitality and friendship are key themes in my work.

My extensive oeuvre consists of drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, performances, and texts. I exhibit regularly at home and abroad.

After finishing gymnasium, I studied at the University of Tel Aviv.I studied electrical engineering and philosophy.

On Friendship / (Collateral Damage) V
- Between Graveyard and Museum’s Sphere
Het Nieuwe Domein, Sittard, solo exhibition
February 3 - June 30, 2024

At first glance, a cemetery and a museum seem to have little in common. Yet they both give meaning to the artworks Joseph Sassoon Semah presents in the exhibition. He takes the visitor on a wonderful journey of exploration from King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, through Baghdad's lost public space, the waiting room of his grandfather Sassoon Kadoori (1886-1971), the chief rabbi of Baghdad, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, to spatial architecture based on the Talmud Bavli.
Simultaneously, he explores his personal Galut (diaspora)—the complex identity being created in Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Amsterdam. The exhibition title alludes to life in exile ('Galut') with no motherland and physical cultural heritage to return to (personal graveyard), as well to the museum, which has erased the knowledge of the Jewish layers of imagery/meaning in Western artworks (universal graveyard). Each of Sassoon Semah's artworks in Het Nieuwe Domein serves as a witness to the profound loss, and at the same time reclaiming the lost world and making Jewish culture, symbols, tradition, and iden...