‘The Migration of the Wings’: Jill Magid at M

THE MIGRATION OF THE WINGS

Jill Magid at M

'The Migration of the Wings' is a multimedia installation with a surprising premise: 'The Last Supper', Dieric Bouts' famous triptych in Leuven's St Peter's Church. From April 2023, you can see Jill Magid's work at M.

Magid is a New Yorker who has already exhibited all over the world. Why exactly did she choose a religious painting from medieval Leuven as her inspiration?

Jill Magid: "A few years ago, Valerie Verhack from M suggested I make a new piece of work. I then started looking through M's online collection for inspiration, and kept on coming back to 'The Last Supper'. I did not know the work, I must confess, but I was immediately fascinated."

"At the time, I was just working on an assignment for the Dia Art Foundation's Artists on Artists series in New York – a lecture on Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. She had a very distinctive way of portraying characters: frontally, at eye level, often silent and expressionless. I saw that approach reflected in the central panel of 'The Last Supper'. A serene, almost hermetic silence surrounds the scene with Jesus and the apostles. Completely different from the four side panels, the 'wings'. Here, you see movement, action, turmoil. A huge contrast. I instinctively knew that this is a starting point for the piece I want to make."

"I then started looking into the history of the triptych, and that confirmed my first impression. The central panel shows a scene from the New Testament – the story of Christ, the basis of Christianity. The side panels show scenes from the Old Testament, which, as you know, is also the holy book of the Jews. Bouts, especially the theologians he consulted, saw those scenes as prefigurations of the last supper with Jesus and his apostles. But if you study them in more detail, you will see every single one of them showing Jews fleeing. The lower left panel, for example, shows the Jewish Easter sacrifice. In the middle you see a table, just like on the central panel, but there is no one sitting at this table. There are men and women standing around it with walking sticks in hand, and the door is open. In other words, they could take off at any point."

For me, "'The Last Supper' something about power. In the middle you see the majority that form the default; to the side is the minority who are literally relegated to the margins. This is evident already from the title, the triptych is officially called 'The Altarpiece of the Blessed Sacrament', but everyone speaks of 'The Last Supper', when in fact that refers only to the central panel. So the language masks what happens at the margins."

Triptiek met het Laatste Avondmaal en bijbelse taferelen: Laatste Avondmaal (middenpaneel)

Triptiek met het Laatste Avondmaal: Ontmoeting van Abraham en Melchisedek (linker zijluik)

Triptiek met het Laatste Avondmaal: joods Paasmaal (linker zijluik)

Triptiek met het Laatste Avondmaal: Verzamelen van het manna in de woestijn (rechter zijluik)

Triptiek met het Laatste Avondmaal en bijbelse taferelen: Elias en de engel (linker zijluik)

Eventful history

"I also delved into the later history of the triptych, and in it you can see that opposition between centre and margin coming back time and time again. The middle panel has always remained in St Peter's Church, but the side panels have moved around a great deal. They were presumably considered less important, less valuable. The triptych was dismantled in the 17th century and the four side panels were sold separately. They eventually ended up in museums in Munich and Berlin. After World War I, when Leuven was burned by the Germans, Belgium demanded heavy reparations from Germany. The panels were then returned to Leuven, even though the Germans in fact had never taken them as war booty, and the triptych was restored to its former glory. In the Second World War, SS officers confiscated the side panels again, and they did not handle them with much care. They were stored at Neuschwanstein castle, and later at the Altaussee salt mine. After the war, they were once more reunited with the central panel. In other words, the side panels have themselves been the subject of a power play."

"So Bouts' triptych has an eventful history. But what interests me most is what that history tells us about power, about social norms and who imposes them, about migration and diaspora, about how racism and age-old antagonisms still resonate."

"'The Migration of the Wings' ties in nicely with the rest of my oeuvre. My work revolves around power and control, and the agencies behind it: police, intelligence agencies, banks, big business... I try to negotiate with those agencies, to engage in dialogue because power is not a one-way street. In the case of 'The Last Supper', I asked myself the question: who owns a work of art? Because possession is just as much a form of power."

Multimedia

"'The Migration of the Wings' is a multimedia work. It includes two screens with film images. In the first screen, I show images I took a few years ago, when 'The Last Supper' was dismantled and moved during the restoration of St Peter's Church. My film only shows the actual dismantling, I saw that as a unique opportunity to portray it. This dismantling, of course, was done with a great deal of care and for a good reason, very different from the past, but I still saw traces of violence in it: I tried to capture that. I used a soundscape to accompany the images, to further emphasise that violent aspect."

"Last summer, I also travelled to all the places where the side panels have been over the centuries: St Peter's Church, the museums in Munich and Berlin, Neuschwanstein, the salt mine.... I took footage of that, and have used that in the second screen. We simultaneously made sound recordings of those places, or rather of their unique resonance. We then processed those into a second soundscape. The soundscapes echo each other, but at the same time the many displacements of the panels. They are a crucial part of my installation as they are attempts for exploring whether places and objects can capture the echo of history. I want to give the visitor a physical, visceral experience. That is much more important to my work than the historical narrative behind it. That's interesting too, and there's definitely a place for it, but the essence is what I do with it as an artist."

Jill Magid, 'The Migration of The Wings', two-channel digital video, sound (in progress), film still, 2023

Echoes of pain and violence

"In addition to the film images and soundscapes, I also created some sculptural elements. Replicas, for example, of the original hinges of the triptych, connecting the side panels to the central panel. Every time the triptych was dismantled, those hinges had to be unscrewed – 'unhinged' we say in English, a beautiful word that also means 'disturbed' at the same time. That seemed like a nice metaphor for the constant back-and-forth with the side panels. By the way, those original hinges are brilliant objects, thick and sturdy with a clever designed. That appealed to me."

"So I also made two sculpted books. One shows 'The Last Supper' again, the other tells an age-old anti-Semitic myth about a rich Jew who supposedly pierced a piece of communion bread. The host allegedly started to bleed, in the Middle Ages that was called the Sacrament of Miracle. In 1370, this myth sparked a pogrom in Brabant in which a lot of Jews were murdered or exiled. That history of violence and marginalisation has since been repeated time and again. Only last year, there was an uproar around a potentially anti-Semitic work at the Documenta exhibition. That's what it's all about for me, not about 'The Last Supper' per se, but about the traces of trauma, the echoes of pain and violence, the story of the diaspora too. Those I want to trace and visualise. I am Jewish myself, so for me this is very personal. The story is not over yet, by the way. Who knows, maybe the side panels will someday be taken away?"

"I hope visitors, having seen my installation, will see 'The Last Supper' with different eyes. That they realise: behind this work is a centuries-long history of violence and trauma. For me, that's what art can do. You think you know something, but then you see a work of art and realise: wait a minute, it's completely different! I remember standing in the Altaussee salt mine, in that cold cave where Hitler kept his looted art, and suddenly a very strong sensation of what had actually happened there came over me. That is the feeling I would like to pass on to visitors."