Winds destroy Venice’s flying synagogue: Anna Kamyshan’s “Nabatele” brought down by storm

The installation “Nabatele” — a giant helium balloon in the shape of a flying wooden synagogue, in the style of the shtetl — was destroyed by extreme winds on September 17, 2026. The work by architect Anna Kamyshan, an official collateral event of the Venice Biennale, was flying 35 meters above the Venice lagoon when the storm brought it down, The Art Newspaper reported.

The balloon was designed to withstand winds of up to 20 knots, but faced 50-knot winds — more than double its design limit. The structure, a double membrane inspired by René Magritte’s painting “The Castle in the Pyrenees” (1959), could not withstand the fury of the storm.

On Sunday, September 20, at the start of Yom Kippur, Kamyshan posted security camera footage on Instagram showing the wind deflating and tearing the synagogue. She wrote: “Maybe it’s not a bad moment to let Nabatele go: to accept what we couldn’t control, to forgive ourselves for what we couldn’t prevent and to start again… There is something deeply Jewish in the possibility of continuing after destruction, not by pretending nothing happened, but by carrying what happened and creating something new.”

The name “Nabat” means “alarm bell” or “alarm” in Yiddish, softened by the diminutive suffix “-ele.” Curators Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks invited Kamyshan to develop the work for the ephemeral “Yiddishland” pavilion; the work “enters into dialogue” with the history of Venice’s Jewish Ghetto, where Jewish life flourished despite the ban on street-level synagogues. The project was sponsored by the Montreal Jewish Museum, with support from private donors and foundations.

Anna Kamyshan is an architect based in London and New York, originally from Lviv, Ukraine; from 2019 to 2021 she co-created the conceptual vision of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv.

Source: The Art Newspaper