“Durational video can be watched during museum hours. Running now through January 31st.”

Curated by Joel Silverman, 18:18:18 (2018) by Jason Francisco is a series of eighteen time-based works that exist between cinema and photography, each filmed in a single take at one of roughly 50,000 sites of the Jewish Holocaust. Each piece lasts exactly 18 minutes, 18 seconds, and 18 milliseconds—a duration tied to the Jewish number chai, meaning “life”—and is presented on two opposing screens that cannot be viewed simultaneously, mirroring how Jewish memory in former shtetls across Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Ukraine is often glimpsed only over one’s shoulder. These seemingly ordinary landscapes—playgrounds, fields, roads, and city streets—hold nearly erased histories, from a Kraków playground built against the last surviving fragment of the ghetto wall to a garbage dump in Zhovkva covering a mass grave carved into a Jewish cemetery. Drawing on 30 years of travel to 315 such sites, Francisco uncovers these “shards” of shattered worlds through persistent research and haunting questions of where Jewish life once existed. The films create a quiet parable of presence and absence, inviting viewers into a mindful, life-affirming confrontation with grief and remembrance, echoing the biblical plea: “Earth, do not cover my blood, and let there be no resting place for my cry.”