The group exhibition “Fabric, Sweat, and Tears” examines the links between identity and memory woven into fabric and emanating from it. The title refers (not coincidentally) to the foundational speech by Winston Churchill in 1940, “Blood, Sweat, and Tears,” which succeeded in inspiring the British people and infused them with hope to stand firm against the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, Japan and their collaborators).
Fabric embodies laborious, often Sisyphean work with material and applied to material. The sweat is immanent, arising from the fundamental labor and the tears comprising the emotional component linking the engaged worker with memory, identity, and meaning. The traditional object (the fabric or piece of clothing) abandons its functional and aesthetic purpose and is transformed into the conveyor of messages linked to memory, beliefs, religion, femininity, masculinity, the group, and rituals, or, alternatively, to art history.
The exhibition is eclectic; the multiplicity of voices linked to thread, clothing, the body identity and memory become intensified to become something more, something experienced by all of us during difficult months with memories embodied in the body, the piece of clothing and public consciousness.. The exhibition, with works by male and female artists and contemporary designers, includes works exhibited in the past which take on new meaning in an additional interpretative layer due to recent events, and other works made over recent months. The physical body is absent from the works, but appears in a performance* at the opening event as an invitation to closeness and the beginning of interpretation.
Curators: Efi Gen, Keren Weisshaus, Vera Pilpoul
Aniam Dery
Garments of Light
The sculpture Garments of Light, was inspired by the biblical verse, “And the LORD God made garments of skins for Adam and his wife and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21), but the title comes from Rabbi Meir’s interpretation of the verse.
A student of Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Meir stated that “garments of skin” – ‘or meaning skin in Hebrew – could be read as “garments of light” – or in Hebrew, enveloping garments revealing or concealing the light of the soul.
In her studio, Dery cast 40 meters of latex sheets simulating textile which she used to create a long dress inspired by a design by Christian Dior. The display mannequin is tilted forward like the carved figurehead of a ship.
The skin-colored dress is clothing that is an obvious emphasis on the barrier between the exposed private, gendered body and between what is external, open to all viewers, turning extreme attention to the dictates of fashion expressed in the homage to Dior. The motivation for this splendid work is Dery’s extensive material research and handcrafted process for the latex.
It also arises from the desire to connect the accepted dictates of “modest dress” in religious society with the fashion world. The work stimulates a sensuous, material, illusionistic experience in viewers which is both challenging and breathtaking.
Ester Schneider
The Suprematist Wall
Ester Schneider unravels the geometric abstraction of Suprematism: compositions made of simple geometric forms through which the Russian avant-garde artists active after World War I attempted to express metaphysical ideas with the help of geometric lines and forms.
Instead of a wall made of rigid geometrical materials and forms, Ester Schneider’s monumental sculptural wall installation* is made of cloth, artificial hair, satin ribbons, and additional soft materials. The complex and multilayered composition is based on the warp and woof structure. Schneider weaves together peacock feathers, thread, fringes and textile, replacing the classical volumetric sculptural mass with airy volume.
The complex composition creates a fabric of spatial elements with numerous perspective points, a kind of architectural gaze at a strange, sacred space attached to the wall; the other aspect is the locks of artificial hair woven into threads, and the textile, which refers to the spinning and weaving which since ancient times have been identified as “women’s work” as it was mostly accomplished within the domestic sphere.
This wall piece by Ester Schneider, as in many of her works, indirectly refers to women’s concealed body parts and hair, creating a presence connecting body and clothing to spirit.
*The materials for the installation are from Hasidic clothing which “clothed” the Suprematist composition based on El Lissitzky’s drawings and collages.
Efrat Natan
Escape Window
Efrat Natan uses simple materials in her artworks, such as windows and undershirts common in her environment as she grew up in the 1950s, which were also the early years of the state. The first undershirts in her oeuvre were children’s undershirts – small, pure white, and whole (currently on view in the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod, in the exhibition from its collection). In her early works, the adults’ undershirts were whole, but deteriorated more and more until they tore and became entirely worn away.
In the work on view, the undershirt became so ragged its identity changed. Efrat Natan exhibited this piece in a different form under a different title. Three years ago it was again shown in the Ramot Menashe Art Gallery (on Kibbutz Ramot Menashe), changed for its site-specific installation.
It became similar to the window of the children’s house in which Efrat slept at a child, leading her to rename the work: “Escape Window.” The title was now associated with the nighttime adventure of leaving the children’s house through the window screen. Behind the screen are remnants of undershirts, worn out to the point of being unrecognizable. The fabric fragments hover or wave in the darkness outside, often seeming like frightened or frightening creatures.
In light of the events of the past year which shook us all up, escape from a window and materials crumbling extract additional associations and layers of meaning.
Etti Abergel
Untitled
The jump ropes and black undershirts installed on the gallery wall raise forgotten sensations of place and time. Nevertheless, they bear a temporarily that characterizes Etti Abergel’s charged works, maintaining a dynamic system of relationships between installation, sculpture, and space. Abergel begins by making her art in the studio, then works within the exhibition space; thus, the installation takes on a changing presence each time it is installed.
The black undershirts tied to the jump ropes create a kind of wall drawing, acting as an “alternative body,” emphasizing the sweat in the Sisyphean actions involving physical distortion, externalizing the gap between stretching and relaxation, body and soul.
Beyond the connotation contrasting ideal innocence identified with the white undershirts, the black undershirt has become a fashion statement with sex appeal for men and for women, identified less as a work shirt and more as basic, yet attractive, outdoor wear.
“The integration of the engagement in the body-soul image, dress and identity code, led me to engage in the black undershirt which we used to wear to high school gym class. In the context of this series, it represents otherness. Later I became acquainted with the iconic white undershirts in Efrat Natan’s oeuvre and her inspiring works.”
Writing about her most recent solo exhibition “Memoir” (CCA, 2021), Curator Tamar Margalit wrote that Abergel’s formal lexicon is characterized as being “a visual journal of memories creating an encounter between decoration and aesthetic surplus with a seemingly temporary and poor language. Through daily objects and sculptural techniques, Abergel succeeds in gathering fragments of life stories about longing, dreams and failed attempts; small victories along with misses.”
Doron Zeevi
Torah Mantles (series)
Doron Zeevi, fashion and textile designer, makes Judaica using unique methods and textile techniques. Zeevi made the Torah mantles for his Master’s Degree studies from objects and clothing belonging to his father who passed away during Zeevi’s graduate program.
The Judaica items were made of Zeevi’s father’s clothing, possessions and personal items following the tradition of Jewish communities adhering to the principle of “increasing the holiness” of ritual objects instead of reducing their level of sacredness.
In this way, Zeevi re-examines the ancient tradition of creating ritual objects from men and women’s clothing, using textiles processed and adapted to various needs of the synagogue.
One of his series is “Torah Mantle,” whose soft texture and cheerful colorfulness are delightful and draw the eye. At times, they seem like human clothing, almost like a dress. Beyond the design process, the works present his steps of addressing and processing personal loss, longing, and memory, based on the desire to preserve tradition and values along with the need to reconstruct a language and an identity.
The softness of the cloth and the embroidery is evident along with surprising connections to additional raw materials such as screws and pins, linking the worlds of religion with design and fashion, connecting tradition and the contemporary, personal and collective, sacred and mundane.
Andi Arnovitz
Betrothed to the Land
Andi Arnovitz’s oeuvre engages in the deconstruction of paradigms of social, theological, cultural, and legal mechanisms of control that subvert and weaken the individual’s autonomy over one’s body and life.
Arnovitz, raised in a family of fabric merchants, whose grandmother was designer/seamstress, spent her childhood among rolls of fabric in the family’s stores
in the USA. The dress on view in the exhibition is from Andi’s series of dresses on which she has been working since 2005. They examine various aspects of signifiers of woman as an antagonistic political element in a traditional patriarchy.
The style and color of the white dress is reminiscent of a bridal gown. The transparency of the thin silk alludes to the delicacy and vulnerability of those who wear it. The hem is entirely studded with Jerusalem stones instead of precious gems, intended to weigh down the wearer, anchoring her, bringing her “down to earth” to the Israeli reality.
The principle of gravity is in contrast to the lightness of the dress, expressed as well in the opposition of the bridal gown as the highest moment in the life of a young woman and the custom of placing stones on a grave as a symbol of grief and death.
Andi links milestones in life cycles, from marriage to death, the political and the personal, feminist and local. The dress she made about 12 years ago is now being exhibited here in Israel for the first time, taking on even more meaning at present.
Samach Shehadeh
Untitled
Shehadeh’s large-scale, precise drawing in black pencil on white paper astounds viewers. The composition stretches across the center of the paper, floating vertically, without any “handholds” between the void underneath and the emptiness above.
In a world of pain and loss, Shehadeh’ creates an option located in the liminal space between documentation and fiction, between what is and what is not.
We can imagine the encounter with the image being drawn as a meeting with a martyr. The scene seems like a reference to the death of a saint, to Jesus, and even to the Magi.
The hand drawing with maximum precision depicting each fabric fold in the shrouds, each exposed toe, until it seems that we are moving on the axis between the documentation of pain and between the ability to look at “the thing itself.”
The flower-covered cloth covers the head and body, the image and pattern showing that the dead is a woman; through this image Shehadeh, points to a controversial issue in her community: family honor killings, which have become a common phenomenon in Arab society.
The printed flowers are like women’s fingerprints which (perhaps) enable consolation in a conflicted world suffused with struggles in which personal, feminine, and national identities seek rest.
Yael Serlin
Wandering Loom
Wandering Loom (2020) is one of the disrupted looms on which Yael Serlin works, as she recreates actions and crafts that were not transmitted to her. Serlin is interested in the intuitive action more than the correct operation of the loom. The result is a
series of hybrid looms charged with remembering and disaster.
Wandering Loom was constructed on strips of nails Serlin made in the studio following a story her father told her, describing how as a young boy he used to escape from the Talmud Torah [religious pre-school] in the Atlas Mountains village where he grew up. He would run to his father’s store where he would make combs for raw wool, sitting at the entrance and hammering nails for hours.
Serlin repeats her father’s actions, building a loom disrupted by nails. When she was invited to participate in an exhibition in Belgrade, she rolled up the loom, thus creating the Wandering Loom that experienced the travails of travel, preserving something within like an amulet of the action. In Zerbaya (The Woman Weaver), Serlin continues her engagement with weaving. The looms in this series are essentially conveyers of a repetitive action through which the artist channels memories embedded in her body and soul. She builds and spins the looms on wooden Torah scroll handles which are called “Trees of Life,” “Torah” as both transgenerational tradition and instructions on how to live life, a tradition she attempt to find and recreate.
Serlin pulls threads and connects them to fragments of Judaica that also form part of history and shards of memory tightly linked to Jewish identity for generations. Thin gold threads are tightly wound around a Torah scroll handle, the absence of the scroll very present, to create a touching connection creating “syntactical” tension: are these remnants from a hellish event or perhaps something that underwent restoration and healing, the artist having breathed new life into it, bearing hope and faith in the goodness of life. The gold threads trailing down from the work bring to mind the “thread of life” that connects and restores equilibrium, perhaps as a sign, a striving and a symbol of Tikkun Olam – repair of the world.
Uzi Amrani
Jacob’s Ladder,
“This is my resting place”
Two artworks by Uzi Amrani installed one gallery space are placemarks for the two extremes of his life. The tallit in which he wrapped himself as a teenager raised in a religious home, one who left organized religion and then returned to religion, reappears in his life along with the reminder of the death of others.
The Jewish prayer shawl wrapping the military stretcher evoking an unending war is a reminder of imprinted trauma, exhibited along with a rocking chair representing the domestic room, warmth, and family. In its new wrapping, it also becomes Jewish.
The chair’s movement like the movements of soul-searching, seeks stability and calm. The unraveled edges are themselves wrapped, and are wrapped around readymades.
Amrani returns to painting environments in which the familial and the military merge. Wrapping the object creates a kind of transformation: the object becomes like a body which must be shrouded and buried.
Uriel Peer and Roni Shukroun
Be Fake
In the beginning…an undefined, ungendered creature/creation: this is Nona, multidisciplinary artist Roni Shukroun’s alter ego, taking on and discarding changing fluid identities, evolving and transforming through makeup and dress.
Clothing, designed to enable a gender definition of the one wearing the garment, signifying belonging to a particular place and time, simultaneously enables an escape from consensus, bursting the bounds of the body, allowing external expression of one’s inner truth.
Nona’s clothing mutates through the digital filming, from material textile to the virtual image, from threads to pixels. It is precisely the fictional which expresses a new authenticity. Documentation of Nona’s voice and body blends with her replicated image created through AI.
The multiple identities leaves viewers astonished, wondering what is “real” and what is not? What does “authenticity” mean in an era of virtual replication? What is the meaning of “imagination” and “reality” in a pixelated world.
Samira Wehbe
Testimony (from the series “Testimony”)
For Samira Wehbe, the photograph arises from the need to document spontaneous, intimate moments in black and white, focusing on the territory of the women of her Druse community. Women in her village and its environs fascinate her, exposing the local poetic space that engages Wehbe. The photographer has stated that she is aware of living in a society of women due to the accepted social code. This is her starting point for her research into the status of Druse women in Israeli society as well as in Druse society.
Wehbe’s documentation is an act of chronicling woman’s existence in the domestic, communal, religious sphere, locating herself doubly: she faces her subjects, while herself being a part of the locale as an “authentic eye” which is intimate and close, as part of the landscape.
The clothing worn by religious women acts as a barrier from the outside world. She must cover her entire body, summer and winter, to preserve the modesty principles of her religion that sanctify modesty, unity, and avoidance of excessive pleasure. The religious Druse woman covers her head with a Nakab (الفوطه) a large white headscarf or veil.
The choice to work in black and white emphasizes the natural light and the women’s white head coverings looking like halos, reminiscent of medieval paintings of saints. Wehbe thus places the concept of the religious and spiritual concept of the halo in contemporary photography.
Roxy Munteanu
Dowry on the Line
Breathtakingly beautiful handmade fabrics, Roxy Munteanu’s family inheritance, are bundled together and attached to the ancient ficus tree in the yard of the Rishon Le-zion Municipal Gallery like a strange fruit growing on a tree foreign to it. During the exhibition opening night, Roxy goes on a “pilgrimage” to Rishon with the dowry she inherited from her grandmother, Helena Șelaru-Munteanu, when leaving her birthplace, the city of Brasov in the Carpathian Mountains, Romania, to immigrate to Israel.
The artist invites the audience to undo the wrapped textiles and pile them on her head. She carries her dowry with effort to the head of the staircase, rests on them as if she is the “Princess on the Pea,” burrowing into the pile as if into a womb.
Slowly she “paves” the staircase with fabric, making into a large, colorful, cloth mosaic, as if unfurling a multi-hued “red carpet” to honor notables entering the Gallery. The price: stepping on her material treasure, the family legacy the artist brought with her from her childhood home.
Liav Mizrahi
Cuddly Blanket
Liav Mizrahi’s Cuddly Blanket came to him in a dream when he was an adult: he saw himself curled up in a felt blanket in the form of a death notice for his mother, plus an object belonging to her. She had died suddenly when he was 13. The only material things left from her are those two objects.
A bereaved person wraps himself in grief like a blanket, an additional layer always borne on the body. Mourning becomes a permanent accompaniment, charged with longing and absence. Mizrahi’s mother, who protected and nurtured him in childhood, disappeared in a single traumatic moment which left him abandoned and alone. The comforting, protective “blanket” was suddenly stripped away and left the body exposed and vulnerable.
The video work shows the instinctive physical actions involved in felting a blanket: first, processing in water, rubbing with soap, and needle-piercing. The physical activity is accompanied by a soundtrack of S.Y. Agnon reading his story “In the Prime of Her Life.
Liav links the soundtrack to the film as if talking directly about himself and his mother, as a story written about their life and her death. The felting is therapeutic, an activity requiring concentration and patience that helps to repress feelings of isolation, shame, and guilt. Mizrahi invites visitors to participate in felting workshops to purify private grief in the flame of public grief.
דן בירנבוים
רישום
על גבי קיר במבואת הגלריה, מציג האמן והאדריכל דן בירנבוים רישומים נבחרים מתוך עבודות אחרונות. עבודתו הרישומית עסקה בעיקר בתיאור נוף, ישראלי. נופים אשר התעלמו בדרך כלל מנוכחות אנושית. הפעם, נדמה שהאמן מביט אל תוכו. מתוך התנועה המיומנת של מכחול יבש וצבע שחור על נייר, הוא מצליח להעביר אותנו דרך ציור עין, גם אל מה שהעין רואה (העין כמייצגת את המבט, שולחת בעקיפין גם אל דיון פילוסופי עמוק על המבט) [1]. אנחנו חשים את התנועה המתעקלת של היד ורואים את גלגל העין, אישון, דמות שנקלטה במבט. האדמה עליה ניצבים שלושה ברושים (מוטיב ביצירתו וסמל ישראלי) התעגלה באופן בוטח, עד שנדמה שכך יש לציירה. דמות נקלטת בעין, משוכפלת לדמויות רבות ואנחנו מתבוננים ברישום קהל רב של יחידים הנדמים כגופים אורגנים על צלחת פטרי במעבדה. הרישום נכנע לתנועה עגולה, טבעית, כמעט שלמה, שהופכת לבסיס, למקום ממנו נצרבים הדימויים,העין. רישומיו של דן מאופיינים בתחושה דואלית אצל הצופה . תנועת המכחול לצד הקפאת הרגע ונדמה שאנחנו נמצאים על סיפו של דבר מה שיש לבחון אותו שוב. רגע חשוב. הבחירה בטכניקה שהיא כמעט וקליגרפית, יוצרת רגע ציורי, יחידי, מרתק. אלו מתעגלים יחדיו לכדי סממנים חדשים ונוספים ביצירה עשירה, רבת שנים ומרתקת של אמן ישראלי שמצליח לזקק עבודתו כקליגרף יפני, ועם זאת לייצר תחושה מקומית השייכת לכאן ועכשיו.
[1] “הנראה והבלתי נראה” (1964) -מוריס מרלו-פונטי העמיד את הגוף במרכז החוויה התפיסתית של היותנו בעולם. לדעתו, ראייה היא חוויה גופנית, בדרך של דואליות והיפוך: גופי הרואה הוא גם הגוף הנראה על ידי האחר. חוויית היסוד של היותי בעולם היא זו של סובייקט צופה שהוא גם נצפה. גם לאקאן ( 1964, סמינר 11) התייחס להתבוננות: המביט הוא חלק מתמונה רחבה יותר, המבליעה בה את המביט בהיותה כוללת את הצופה שהוא תמיד גם נצפה, ותמיד נמצא גם בשדה המבט של האחר.
Fabric, Sweat, and Tears
22.06.2024 – 12.09.2024
Aniam Dery
Garments of Light
The sculpture Garments of Light, was inspired by the biblical verse, “And the LORD God made garments of skins for Adam and his wife and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21), but the title comes from Rabbi Meir’s interpretation of the verse. A student of Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Meir stated that “garments of skin” – ‘or meaning skin in Hebrew – could be read as “garments of light” – or in Hebrew, enveloping garments revealing or concealing the light of the soul.
In her studio, Dery cast 40 meters of latex sheets simulating textile which she used to create a long dress inspired by a design by Christian Dior. The display mannequin is tilted forward like the carved figurehead of a ship. The skin-colored dress is clothing that is an obvious emphasis on the barrier between the exposed private, gendered body and between what is external, open to all viewers, turning extreme attention to the dictates of fashion expressed in the homage to Dior. The motivation for this splendid work is Dery’s extensive material research and handcrafted process for the latex. It also arises from the desire to connect the accepted dictates of “modest dress” in religious society with the fashion world. The work stimulates a sensuous, material, illusionistic experience in viewers which is both challenging and breathtaking.
Ester Schneider
The Suprematist Wall
Ester Schneider unravels the geometric abstraction of Suprematism: compositions made of simple geometric forms through which the Russian avant-garde artists active after World War I attempted to express metaphysical ideas with the help of geometric lines and forms.
Instead of a wall made of rigid geometrical materials and forms, Ester Schneider’s monumental sculptural wall installation* is made of cloth, artificial hair, satin ribbons, and additional soft materials. The complex and multilayered composition is based on the warp and woof structure. Schneider weaves together peacock feathers, thread, fringes and textile, replacing the classical volumetric sculptural mass with airy volume.
The complex composition creates a fabric of spatial elements with numerous perspective points, a kind of architectural gaze at a strange, sacred space attached to the wall; the other aspect is the locks of artificial hair woven into threads, and the textile, which refers to the spinning and weaving which since ancient times have been identified as “women’s work” as it was mostly accomplished within the domestic sphere.
This wall piece by Ester Schneider, as in many of her works, indirectly refers to women’s concealed body parts and hair, creating a presence connecting body and clothing to spirit.
*The materials for the installation are from Hasidic clothing which “clothed” the Suprematist composition based on El Lissitzky’s drawings and collages.
Efrat Natan
Escape Window
Efrat Natan uses simple materials in her artworks, such as windows and undershirts common in her environment as she grew up in the 1950s, which were also the early years of the state. The first undershirts in her oeuvre were children’s undershirts – small, pure white, and whole (currently on view in the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod, in the exhibition from its collection). In her early works, the adults’ undershirts were whole, but deteriorated more and more until they tore and became entirely worn away.
In the work on view, the undershirt became so ragged its identity changed. Efrat Natan exhibited this piece in a different form under a different title. Three years ago it was again shown in the Ramot Menashe Art Gallery (on Kibbutz Ramot Menashe), changed for its site-specific installation. It became similar to the window of the children’s house in which Efrat slept at a child, leading her to rename the work: “Escape Window.” The title was now associated with the nighttime adventure of leaving the children’s house through the window screen. Behind the screen are remnants of undershirts, worn out to the point of being unrecognizable. The fabric fragments hover or wave in the darkness outside, often seeming like frightened or frightening creatures.
In light of the events of the past year which shook us all up, escape from a window and materials crumbling extract additional associations and layers of meaning.
Etti Abergel
Untitled
The jump ropes and black undershirts installed on the gallery wall raise forgotten sensations of place and time. Nevertheless, they bear a temporarily that characterizes Etti Abergel’s charged works, maintaining a dynamic system of relationships between installation, sculpture, and space. Abergel begins by making her art in the studio, then works within the exhibition space; thus, the installation takes on a changing presence each time it is installed.
The black undershirts tied to the jump ropes create a kind of wall drawing, acting as an “alternative body,” emphasizing the sweat in the Sisyphean actions involving physical distortion, externalizing the gap between stretching and relaxation, body and soul.
Beyond the connotation contrasting ideal innocence identified with the white undershirts, the black undershirt has become a fashion statement with sex appeal for men and for women, identified less as a work shirt and more as basic, yet attractive, outdoor wear. “The integration of the engagement in the body-soul image, dress and identity code, led me to engage in the black undershirt which we used to wear to high school gym class. In the context of this series, it represents otherness. Later I became acquainted with the iconic white undershirts in Efrat Natan’s oeuvre and her inspiring works.”
Writing about her most recent solo exhibition “Memoir” (CCA, 2021), Curator Tamar Margalit wrote that Abergel’s formal lexicon is characterized as being “a visual journal of memories creating an encounter between decoration and aesthetic surplus with a seemingly temporary and poor language. Through daily objects and sculptural techniques, Abergel succeeds in gathering fragments of life stories about longing, dreams and failed attempts; small victories along with misses.”
Doron Zeevi
Torah Mantles (series)
Doron Zeevi, fashion and textile designer, makes Judaica using unique methods and textile techniques. Zeevi made the Torah mantles for his Master’s Degree studies from objects and clothing belonging to his father who passed away during Zeevi’s graduate program. The Judaica items were made of Zeevi’s father’s clothing, possessions and personal items following the tradition of Jewish communities adhering to the principle of “increasing the holiness” of ritual objects instead of reducing their level of sacredness.
In this way, Zeevi re-examines the ancient tradition of creating ritual objects from men and women’s clothing, using textiles processed and adapted to various needs of the synagogue. One of his series is “Torah Mantle,” whose soft texture and cheerful colorfulness are delightful and draw the eye. At times, they seem like human clothing, almost like a dress. Beyond the design process, the works present his steps of addressing and processing personal loss, longing, and memory, based on the desire to preserve tradition and values along with the need to reconstruct a language and an identity.
The softness of the cloth and the embroidery is evident along with surprising connections to additional raw materials such as screws and pins, linking the worlds of religion with design and fashion, connecting tradition and the contemporary, personal and collective, sacred and mundane.
Andi Arnovitz
Betrothed to the Land
Andi Arnovitz’s oeuvre engages in the deconstruction of paradigms of social, theological, cultural, and legal mechanisms of control that subvert and weaken the individual’s autonomy over one’s body and life.
Arnovitz, raised in a family of fabric merchants, whose grandmother was a designer/seamstress, spent her childhood among rolls of fabric in the family’s stores in the USA. The dress on view in the exhibition is from Andi’s series of dresses on which she has been working since 2005. They examine various aspects of signifiers of woman as an antagonistic political element in a traditional patriarchy.
The style and color of the white dress is reminiscent of a bridal gown. The transparency of the thin silk alludes to the delicacy and vulnerability of those who wear it. The hem is entirely studded with Jerusalem stones instead of precious gems, intended to weigh down the wearer, anchoring her, bringing her “down to earth” to the Israeli reality.
The principle of gravity is in contrast to the lightness of the dress, expressed as well in the opposition of the bridal gown as the highest moment in the life of a young woman and the custom of placing stones on a grave as a symbol of grief and death.
Andi links milestones in life cycles, from marriage to death, the political and the personal, feminist and local. The dress she made about 12 years ago is now being exhibited here in Israel for the first time, taking on even more meaning at present.
Samach Shehadeh
Untitled
Shehadeh’s large-scale, precise drawing in black pencil on white paper astounds viewers. The composition stretches across the center of the paper, floating vertically, without any “handholds” between the void underneath and the emptiness above. In a world of pain and loss, Shehadeh’ creates an option located in the liminal space between documentation and fiction, between what is and what is not.
We can imagine the encounter with the image being drawn as a meeting with a martyr. The scene seems like a reference to the death of a saint, to Jesus, and even to the Magi. The hand drawing with maximum precision depicting each fabric fold in the shrouds, each exposed toe, until it seems that we are moving on the axis between the documentation of pain and between the ability to look at “the thing itself.”
The flower-covered cloth covers the head and body, the image and pattern showing that the dead is a woman; through this image Shehadeh, points to a controversial issue in her community: family honor killings, which have become a common phenomenon in Arab society. The printed flowers are like women’s fingerprints which (perhaps) enable consolation in a conflicted world suffused with struggles in which personal, feminine, and national identities seek rest.
Yael Serlin
Wandering Loom
Wandering Loom (2020) is one of the disrupted looms on which Yael Serlin works, as she recreates actions and crafts that were not transmitted to her. Serlin is interested in the intuitive action more than the correct operation of the loom. The result is a series of hybrid looms charged with remembering and disaster. Wandering Loom was constructed on strips of nails Serlin made in the studio following a story her father told her, describing how as a young boy he used to escape from the Talmud Torah [religious pre-school] in the Atlas Mountains village where he grew up. He would run to his father’s store where he would make combs for raw wool, sitting at the entrance and hammering nails for hours.
Serlin repeats her father’s actions, building a loom disrupted by nails. When she was invited to participate in an exhibition in Belgrade, she rolled up the loom, thus creating the Wandering Loom that experienced the travails of travel, preserving something within like an amulet of the action. In Zerbaya (The Woman Weaver), Serlin continues her engagement with weaving. The looms in this series are essentially conveyers of a repetitive action through which the artist channels memories embedded in her body and soul. She builds and spins the looms on wooden Torah scroll handles which are called “Trees of Life,” “Torah” as both transgenerational tradition and instructions on how to live life, a tradition she attempt to find and recreate.
Serlin pulls threads and connects them to fragments of Judaica that also form part of history and shards of memory tightly linked to Jewish identity for generations. Thin gold threads are tightly wound around a Torah scroll handle, the absence of the scroll very present, to create a touching connection creating “syntactical” tension: are these remnants from a hellish event or perhaps something that underwent restoration and healing, the artist having breathed new life into it, bearing hope and faith in the goodness of life. The gold threads trailing down from the work bring to mind the “thread of life” that connects and restores equilibrium, perhaps as a sign, a striving and a symbol of Tikkun Olam – repair of the world.
Uzi Amrani
Jacob’s Ladder
This is my resting place
Two artworks by Uzi Amrani installed one gallery space are placemarks for the two extremes of his life. The tallit in which he wrapped himself as a teenager raised in a religious home, one who left organized religion and then returned to religion, reappears in his life along with the reminder of the death of others.
The Jewish prayer shawl wrapping the military stretcher evoking an unending war is a reminder of imprinted trauma, exhibited along with a rocking chair representing the domestic room, warmth, and family. In its new wrapping, it also becomes Jewish. The chair’s movement like the movements of soul-searching, seeks stability and calm. The unraveled edges are themselves wrapped, and are wrapped around readymades. Amrani returns to painting environments in which the familial and the military merge. Wrapping the object creates a kind of transformation: the object becomes like a body which must be shrouded and buried.
Uriel Peer and Roni Shukroun
Be Fake
In the beginning…an undefined, ungendered creature/creation: this is Nona, multidisciplinary artist Roni Shukroun’s alter ego, taking on and discarding changing fluid identities, evolving and transforming through makeup and dress. Clothing, designed to enable a gender definition of the one wearing the garment, signifying belonging to a particular place and time, simultaneously enables an escape from consensus, bursting the bounds of the body, allowing external expression of one’s inner truth.
Nona’s clothing mutates through the digital filming, from material textile to the virtual image, from threads to pixels. It is precisely the fictional which expresses a new authenticity. Documentation of Nona’s voice and body blends with her replicated image created through AI. The multiple identities leaves viewers astonished, wondering what is “real” and what is not? What does “authenticity” mean in an era of virtual replication? What is the meaning of “imagination” and “reality” in a pixelated world.
Samira Wehbe
Testimony (from the series “Testimony”)
For Samira Wehbe, the photograph arises from the need to document spontaneous, intimate moments in black and white, focusing on the territory of the women of her Druse community. Women in her village and its environs fascinate her, exposing the local poetic space that engages Wehbe. The photographer has stated that she is aware of living in a society of women due to the accepted social code. This is her starting point for her research into the status of Druse women in Israeli society as well as in Druse society.
Wehbe’s documentation is an act of chronicling woman’s existence in the domestic, communal, religious sphere, locating herself doubly: she faces her subjects, while herself being a part of the locale as an “authentic eye” which is intimate and close, as part of the landscape.
The clothing worn by religious women acts as a barrier from the outside world. She must cover her entire body, summer and winter, to preserve the modesty principles of her religion that sanctify modesty, unity, and avoidance of excessive pleasure. The religious Druse woman covers her head with a Nakab (الفوطه) a large white headscarf or veil.
The choice to work in black and white emphasizes the natural light and the women’s white head coverings looking like halos, reminiscent of medieval paintings of saints. Wehbe thus places the concept of the religious and spiritual concept of the halo in contemporary photography.
Roxy Munteanu
Dowry on the Line
Breathtakingly beautiful handmade fabrics, Roxy Munteanu’s family inheritance, are bundled together and attached to the ancient ficus tree in the yard of the Rishon Le-zion Municipal Gallery like a strange fruit growing on a tree foreign to it. During the exhibition opening night, Roxy goes on a “pilgrimage” to Rishon with the dowry she inherited from her grandmother, Helena Șelaru-Munteanu, when leaving her birthplace, the city of Brasov in the Carpathian Mountains, Romania, to immigrate to Israel.
The artist invites the audience to undo the wrapped textiles and pile them on her head. She carries her dowry with effort to the head of the staircase, rests on them as if she is the “Princess on the Pea,” burrowing into the pile as if into a womb. Slowly she “paves” the staircase with fabric, making into a large, colorful, cloth mosaic, as if unfurling a multi-hued “red carpet” to honor notables entering the Gallery. The price: stepping on her material treasure, the family legacy the artist brought with her from her childhood home.
Liav Mizrahi
Cuddly Blanket
Liav Mizrahi’s Cuddly Blanket came to him in a dream when he was an adult: he saw himself curled up in a felt blanket in the form of a death notice for his mother, plus an object belonging to her. She had died suddenly when he was 13. The only material things left from her are those two objects.
A bereaved person wraps himself in grief like a blanket, an additional layer always borne on the body. Mourning becomes a permanent accompaniment, charged with longing and absence. Mizrahi’s mother, who protected and nurtured him in childhood, disappeared in a single traumatic moment which left him abandoned and alone. The comforting, protective “blanket” was suddenly stripped away and left the body exposed and vulnerable.
The video work shows the instinctive physical actions involved in felting a blanket: first, processing in water, rubbing with soap, and needle-piercing. The physical activity is accompanied by a soundtrack of S.Y. Agnon reading his story “In the Prime of Her Life.” Liav links the soundtrack to the film as if talking directly about himself and his mother, as a story written about their life and her death. The felting is therapeutic, an activity requiring concentration and patience that helps to repress feelings of isolation, shame, and guilt. Mizrahi invites visitors to participate in felting workshops to purify private grief in the flame of public grief.