Rivka'le of Um El Fahem
curator: Effi Gen
The Um El Fahem Gallery

"Rivka'le of Um El Fahem" is a video installation designed to react to the space and context where it is presented. In the gallery in Um El Fahem the video is projected onto a bed of broken shards. The work offers a junction for three existences: the Diaspora-Jewish existence, the Israeli and the local Arabic one. The video presents the artist floating in the Dead Sea. The image is that of a young woman wearing a white night gown, floating in an undefined space. The night gown and the water are white and glittering to the extent that nearly all details are lost. The head and limbs appear as amputated organs without the connecting body. The only clue of the body mass is the rhythm of the waves which move it about. The floating condition holds the body in a primeval meeting point between wakefulness and sleep, between being alive and being dead. Floating in the Dead Sea has a symbolic meaning: the "Sea of Death", the lowest place in the world, the desert blinding sun and the burning salt devoid of sweetness and comfort – all these reflect dealing with pain which is the outcome of one's being in the lowest rung. The broken pieces of shards encompass the memory of "the whole", which is not possible in days of hatred, as well as the break we live in the everyday reality in Israel. The pieces of shards have a political-historical significance having been dug out in archeological excavations beyond the "green line", in the Palestinian autonomy territories. In the work "Rivka'le of Um El Fahem", they represent the Israeli "Arabness" on one hand and on another, a conflict-free aspect, an echo for a distance, pre-political past, in which the predecessors of both nations have resided in this piece of land. The meeting of the projected, evasive image with the broken, sharp shards "wounds" the body and breaks its uniformity by the piled pieces of shards. The pile of shards is built in order to produce various meanings: it alludes to a fresh heap on an open grave, but in its relation to the space it is built as a closed mausoleum. The image of the sleeping woman, which hovers over the pieces of shards, enables them to be also a torments bed, but the fact that the pieces are positioned in a flexible manner preserves their origin: scattered in the bowels of the earth until they are gathered and become one significant mass. The soundtrack in the background is an adaptation to a Yiddish song adapted and performed by Chava Alberstein, especially made for the work "Rivka'le". It is delivered without instrumental accompaniment, as a lullaby sang by a mother to her sleeping daughter. The daughter is present as a grown up woman in floating posture – a temporary condition between life and death. The lullaby is thus being understood as a lament examining mother-daughter relationship in a reality of war, loss and bereavement. The grief of the mother, who laments her child, is common to all people, in a war which has only losers.