The Jewish Museum and Center for Tolerance in Moscow announced the opening of its major autumn exhibition project, “The Process.” Franz Kafka and the Art of the Twentieth Century.”
Kafka’s vision of the twentieth century is presented with striking clarity here. Although many of his novels remained unfinished, including The Trial, which was written against the backdrop of the First World War, Kafka described the tests that would shape the era with unsettling precision: loneliness, absurdity, and the struggle to resist a vast, impersonal system. The museum’s presentation draws a line from these themes to the rise of totalitarian frameworks across Europe, the emergence of fascist ideologies, and the devastation of World War II, tracing how imagination and power intertwined in that century.
Exhibition titled “Process. Franz Kafka and Twentieth-Century Art” unfolds through multiple routes that converge toward the exhibition’s core, conceived as a reference to the novel The Castle.
The first route follows one of Kafka’s most famous narratives, The Metamorphosis, and is enriched with pieces by German expressionists Georg Grosz, Max Pechstein, Egon Schiele, and others, creating a dialogue between literary transformation and visual representation.
The second path recreates the atmosphere of a Kafkaesque office as depicted in The Trial. It showcases works by conceptualists such as Joseph Kosuth, Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov, Dmitry Prigov, and related artists, inviting visitors to reflect on the bureaucratic and interpretive frameworks that haunt modern life.
There is also an effort to present a different, wittier side of Kafka at the show — a man capable of humor and marked by an unusual fate, challenging familiar stereotypes about the writer.
The project brings together more than 100 works from the collections of major Russian institutions, including the State Hermitage, the State Museum of Fine Arts, and prominent national galleries such as the Pushkin Museum, the State Russian Museum, and the State Tretyakov Gallery. Works from the Architecture Museum and other notable collections are also included, offering a wide panorama of the era’s artistic production.
The exhibition runs from October 11, 2023 to January 14, 2024, inviting audiences to explore the intersection of Kafka’s literary vision with twentieth-century visual art, political upheaval, and cultural memory, all within the setting of Moscow’s premiere museum spaces.
In related cultural moments, debates around modern cinema and speculative narratives have continued to resonate, underscoring the ongoing relevance of Kafka’s themes in contemporary storytelling and artistic practice.