As London-based artist Hugo Max prepares for a multimedia screening of his experimental short films, we find out about the inspiration behind his Kosher Giraffe project

Austrian-British multidisciplinary artist Hugo Max works in an astonishing range of media. Not only has he created surreal installations and put on performances in Oxford’s medieval Jewish cemetery, he has produced oil paintings, where the turbulent thickness of the surface recalls one of his heroes, Frank Auerbach; devotes much of his time to digital and analogue experimental films; and accompanies silent films on the viola. Now, he's preparing for a special screening of his Kosher Giraffe project at JW3, which will incorporate live scoring, a Q&A and will be preceded by a workshop on improvisational drawing for young people.

*Still from Tempelgasse, Super-8 transferred to digital, 2026 © Hugo Max*

While studying at Oxford’s Ruskin College of Art, Max began exploring the life of his great-grandfather Chaim Tenenhaus, who was born in the historical Central/Eastern European region of Bukovina in 1897. Chaim studied in Vienna, before finding his way to England, where he was interned as an ‘enemy alien’ on the Isle of Man. “It is a fractured portrait,” Max says of his 10-minute film Chaim, which is oblique and poetic, but builds a bare yet poignant narrative using documents in the archives at the University of Vienna; the spiral staircase in Chaim’s old apartment building; a plaque memorialising a synagogue destroyed on Kristallnacht; Max's grandmother Meta looking at old photographs and reminiscing about her father; street maps, barbed wire, boarding houses and the promenade at dusk on the Isle of Man.

Although this is a powerful film, Max realised he was more intrigued by the gaps in the stories that had been handed down to him and by the sheer strangeness of life on the Isle of Man, where internees “created a sort of university out of nothing”. He describes it as “something absurd, almost hilarious”.

All this somehow became linked in his mind with “the old Jewish joke that giraffe meat would be kosher, if only we knew where to cut the neck”. Though this misrepresents the process of ‘koshering’ as involving decapitation, Max became fascinated by the disturbing image of the headless animal and “strangeness of an encounter with a giraffe in an enclosure” and he associated them with his persecuted, imprisoned great-grandfather. Such themes permeate both the Kosher Giraffe Trilogy films (Standing Prayer, Letter: Primrose Hill and Enemy Alien) and accompanying limited edition book of the same name.

*Improvisational drawing workshop © Emma Croman*

All four of these films will be shown together next month, alongside more recent pieces, such as Meta Etude, which shows his grandmother during Passover, cooking matzah brie and playing the piano (with Max attempting to follow her fingering on live viola). Plus Nosfera2, which also uses a solo viola score as well as footage from influential German director FW Murnau’s celebrated silent adaptation of Dracula to explore intergenerational trauma.

Max’s works are deeply rooted in Jewish family history, but utterly committed to formal experimentation, resulting in an undeniably fascinating body of work.

By Matthew Reisz

Kosher Giraffes & Other Tails takes place Thursday 11 June. 8pm. £15, £7.50 for under-25s. JW3, London, NW3 6ET. jw3.org.uk
The Improvisational Drawing workshop (open to ages 20-39) starts at 6.30pm and costs £12 (including entry to the screening).