In all its 100-year history, the current project marks the first time that the Jewish Museum has really presented its activities to the wider local public, says Michaela Hájková, curator of visual arts at the museum. It is also the first time the Jewish Museum has installed a contemporary artwork in public space. "Ninety-five percent of our visitors are tourists," notes Hájková, but this work is expected to be viewed by a large number of Prague residents, in addition to out-of-town visitors.

Reflecting upon the museum's role as a repository of memory and its century-long work in archiving Jewish cultural artifacts was a primary theme for Shiff. Another important motif was weather. "The ebbs and flows of history are symbolized by weather," she says. It represents "the turbulence and changes over the past 100 years."

Imagery from the devastating August 2002 floods conveys a more literal and localized concept of weather, and references the pulling together of people from all communities and walks of life during that time. The idea, says Hájková, is that "It concerns you. It concerns your life. We're all in the same ark."

The work pays homage to the Jewish Museum in Prague as a vital guardian of Jewish culture in Europe, both before and after World War II. The Jewish Museum was where Hitler amassed the Jewish ritual objects confiscated from European Jews, intending them for display in a future museum of an extinct people. Thus it also references the notion of preservation that is present in the biblical story of Noah's Ark.

The ark symbolizes displacement, escape and salvage — all concepts vital to the Jewish experience in the past century. "It is not just the particular but the universal metaphor of museum as ark and archive," Shiff says.

The concept for the piece originated about a year ago. "I knew it was going to be a grand project," says Shiff, "and that I would need an architect and an engineer." Constructing a level base for the ship on the uneven cobblestone lane was itself a major undertaking. "It's almost like building a cathedral," she jokes.

The ark — constructed from sheets of translucent matte acrylic connected by a metal framework — was transported by container ship in its component parts and was assembled in situ. The curved front of the ship acts as a screen for the video montage, which plays from two separate projectors housed inside the boat. It is impossible to see the entire screen from a single vantage point.

In April, Shiff started making video footage inside the Jewish Museum, opening up drawers and shooting the numerous artifacts inside. She also filmed inside the museum's depository in the Smíchov Synagogue as well as in the Libeň Synagogue.

Archive material is interspersed with symbols representing the vagaries of the museum's history. One such symbol is the star. We first see it on a grille from a synagogue that was destroyed during the sweeping urban renewal at the turn of the 20th century. It becomes the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to wear during the Nazi occupation, then mutates into the communist red star, and finally changes form once again as the Jewish Museum becomes a private institution.

Numbers also are interjected into the video, sometimes with cabalistic meaning and other times representing accession numbers for items in the museum's collections but also invoking the human beings who were tattooed with ID numbers at concentration camps.

The site Hájková and Shiff chose for Ark has a strong genius loci. The lane lies at the entry to the former Jewish ghetto and leads to the Old Jewish Cemetery. Steps away from the sculpture is the Pinkas Synagogue, housing a powerful Holocaust memorial consisting of the hand-inscribed names of the nearly 80,000 Jews deported from the Czech lands. The synagogue was among the many buildings damaged in the 2002 floods.

Ark is not only about the preservation of Jewish heritage, but about bringing it more alive. The intention is to not only illuminate the past but also light the path for the museum's second century of existence.