Curators: Efi Gen

Orna Ben-Ami’s artistic work draws from historical documentary sources – as well as from personal memory. The historical documentation is based on period photographs taken by mainly anonymous photographers from the beginning of the Zionist settlement in Rishon Le-Zion. Rishon Le-Zion is celebrating its 140th anniversary, and so it was natural for Orna to work in preparation for the exhibition with the archive of the city’s historical museum, which contains approximately 30,000 period photographs.

120-130 years ago, the operation of photography was not as simple and as recurrent as it is today. Preparation was required, equipment which was sometimes heavy or complex, a fixed position to take pictures, etc. This meant that photography involved professional expertise. Orna is aware of the process in which her artistic action is made ‘on top of’ and in relation to the artistic action of another. She does not hide the source of the photograph, does not erase the past, but leaves it and builds ‘another floor’ above it. The result allows space for the two artists who participate in it: both the photographer and the iron artist are present, and on the other hand the chosen photograph, the enlargement, and its subjects treated by her, confront us with a past in a selective, unique way with a distinct and personal artistic language. Some of the sources are historical, archival photographs. Since this is Zionist history, diving into the album has a common connotation for all of us, these are all of our families, the historical foundations on which we build our lives in this place. Orna is aware of the photographer’s choice. She seemingly conducts a secret dialogue with the photographers. It is the human diversity in the photo of the Rishon Le-Zion Orchestra in the streets that excited Orna and drew her to the photo. Musicians, women wearing high fashion, men, children, Arabs and Jews, a large, fascinating blend.

Orna works from memory while drawing the viewer to their own memories. As an artist, she maneuvers between two common options of display in space (displaying on walls or on the floor) while producing another/new option of sculptural works created from and on historical, period photographs that have been enlarged. Orna creates from and to photography: hats, dresses, jackets, shirts, musical instruments, and baskets. Each of the photographed objects is selected and becomes an object with a three-dimensional body that is present in the work it is integrated with: a wall photo that is a sculpture that carries a volumetric presence. She recognizes versatility: a turban for one (a clothing symbol of the Ottoman period), a ‘sailor’s hat’ for another (a typical European cap of the late 19th century), casket hats (a round and soft hat without a brim, made of wool, tweed or cotton), or women’s brimmed hats.

The choice to focus on articles of clothing is a feminine and personal choice connected to the artist’s origins, whose creative mother was also a seamstress. One of the exhibition spaces in the gallery is dedicated to the memory of her mother’s house: an image of a seamstress leaning over a ׳Singer׳ machine. The presence of the action is also maintained through a simple weld made of iron and ׳stitched on the wall׳ above. An iron blanket is laid on the floor of the space and a childhood dress made of iron hangs on a wall, complementing and ׳melting׳ her memories, hardening them into a seemingly masculine material whose treatment and results are completely feminine.

The gallery spaces essentially create a course of movement between personal memories (the mother sewing, the father an athlete-runner reaching the finish line, the family dining table, the sign of the ׳living room׳ and the library) towards the memory of the past intertwined with the present. A dining table is displayed in one of the exhibition spaces and is as if broken, or interrupted, requiring its parts to lean on top of each other to create stability, as family members support and help each other. There is no intention to create a sculpture of a generic table but to recall the dining table (which is in every viewer׳s memories), the family’s dining table. The rocking chair is not complete, also functions on the gap between reality and its documentation. The library cannot really contain the books but is a sign, a record in space.

Orna demonstrates the connection to the present with charcoal drawings on canvas. The texture of the fabric holds something of the feeling of passing. The fabric reminds one of jute, burlap, or linen, one that has not yet been fully planed. Orna chooses to create a charcoal drawing of her granddaughter performing artistic gymnastics exercises both in a group and alone. The relationship between her sportsman father (Palestine running champion during the 1930s) and her gymnastic granddaughter is the strong family bond that creates a bridge between the past and the present.

It is almost politically incorrect to refer today in a gendered manner to the technique/medium through which Orna chose to work, and yet there are few women who choose iron as their practice. Welding, framing, and working with large weights as a daily activity in the workshop filled with permanent ferrous dust is not common. In these ways, Orna was and still is a breakthrough artist, and through her work there is another connection to the pioneers in the photographs, women who were not deterred by physical hardship, worked by the sweat of their brow, as equal to men, marking a new egalitarian society. From this, we are forced to ask the question: in the passage of more than a century, to what extent is the pioneering vision fulfilled, and to what extent is gender equality present in our lives Between the story of the Zionist ethos through treated photographs and personal memories, Orna Ben-Ami׳s iron works leave the viewer present, welded to the past and to the emerging present.