What are you working on now?
Nowadays I’m working on a solo exhibition called: “My Savior, Yardenit”. In this exhibition, I’m using a personal crisis (breakup) as an excuse to initiate a symbolic semi-religious ceremony in the Jordan (Yarden) River which later on develops into a breakdown of a self-defense class. I found myself 32 years old, with advertisements for egg freezing and single. My former partner was also my artistic partner so it was a double breakup. In our joint practice, we used to produce projects that mixed reality and art into a new layer of fantasy leveraging the sites and communities where we worked. I decided that our parting should also be digested as an art project in the tension between the “real” and the personal clashing into the imaginary and the mythical.
So I decided to embark on a journey in the Jordan River (under his name- Yarden) and join the community of those baptized there. The site is close to where I grew up and so I was always fascinated with the people coming there from far away countries in the hope of being changed and even more fundamentally to be reborn. For me, they were the exotic other. I found in holy tourism a look that is on the border of romance, dazzled by the story they come with like a love crush state. Next to them are “the locals” who destroy the biblical dream with a modern family kayak cruise. I’m drawn to these kinds of environments.
She’s playing a role in a play, and the setting is both the stage but almost like the main character of the play. Devoting herself to the river. She was Ophelia like, but resourceful. In that sense I thought she was using herself to point on something else, grander and subversive like a bait. – Dafna Falk
How do you initiate working on a project?
I try to think of my work as a system – the sculptures and their meaning build up with all the other actions and the position of it inside the “real world”. The different techniques that I use will emerge through the encounters with the distinct systems and sites. At first, I observe the surroundings and slowly it evolves into a set of questions. At this point, I will come and study the site, its inner power relations, and its performative potential. I try to form a new logic that is built on the local codes wishing to make out the mimetic outputs into something with its own agency, identity, and purpose.
Which means and disciplines do you use when approaching these environments?
My objects, videos, and installations are site-specific projects utilizing relational aesthetics practices through the use of various technologies. From classical sculpting to the use of industrial mechanisms. In this project, I created a set of floating and submerged sculptures that fit the conditions prevailing in an aquatic environment. The sculptures accompanied me on the journey and turned the natural environment and the people in it into characters in my artistic fantasy. I was trying to echo the layered environment between the local and the touristic in the tension between pathetic (damsel in distress), pop (Jesus), and seriousness (heartbreak). The hybrid objects are a mix of the aesthetics of a lifeboat, Christian sacred tourism artifacts, and floating junk.
The first sculpture that I developed was a lifejacket to keep me safe and floating. I wanted to create this cross notion of dependence that often forms within relationships. Also, I wanted to play with this feeling of looking for a savior, imagining my fellow Christian girls who are in love with Jesus, this ultimate unapproachable man. But also feeling like a sexy Baywatch girl with a man in my arms. I had silk screen printed his face on a reflective fabric, like a saint, and used cheap orange fabric like the life jacket of the local kayaks to create my lifejacket. It looks a bit like an orange heart. The semi-naive pathos that is created is then used as a driving force to penetrate beneath the classic gender images.
“J.J. my savior. Water float, M: 32S, Inst: positioned around the waist.
Awake, awake, Bumblebee; awake, awake, utter a song in the Jordan River.
נְהַר הַיַּרְדֵּן is the most winding of the rivers with a ratio of 2.
He shall not look upon the rivers, the flowing streams of honey and curd.”
The second object that emerged was the styrofoam hand in the hand gesture of crossing fingers, I call it „White Lie“, a harmless or trivial lie, especially one told to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. The floating hand is used as a double symbol of wishing and hoping at the same time it looks like a theater artifact of a drawing person. The lightness of this sculpture was then balanced by the heaviness of an anchor, a concrete casting in the shape of a woman’s head. This disproportionate body is made of the conjugation of hand and head only, each pointing in the opposite direction.
The items are focal points that serve as almost tools and means to generate this whole scenario. They carry the narrative, but also hold their own potential. That aura of magic.Like objects of desireand attention, they demand attention on a whim, like bright orange. Almost performative themselves. But they serve some sort of elusive narrative. – Dafna Falk
How does this object reflect the site?
The objects are then used back on the specific site, against it, and with it in a double relationship, producing an almost clownish atmosphere. The performance is documented on the site: a white styrofoam hand with crossed fingers, a concrete anchor in the shape of a woman’s head, a canvas wedding dress, plastic bottles sculpted in the shape of a fetus… The items become a foreign plant, but they are made of the extroverted logic of the place and the result is a surreal fantasy. The act and the objects attract attention like a honey trap that is used to point back to the place itself. Telling a story of truth through a little joke or ill-advised. That’s also a note about the double meaning of the symbols. The lie and the hope – it is a chance for them to co-exist.
How did you use the idea of rebirth in your work?
I came in the hope of being changed to have my own miracle, and the crazy part at this point of the story was that it worked. I did manage to be changed, I fell in love. This hopeless desire to be changed could be seen as madness. There is a special illness called the Jerusalem syndrome – mental phenomena involving the presence of religiously themed ideas, or experiences that are triggered by a visit to the city of Jerusalem. Those wounded tourists, who see signs everywhere in a state of total infatuation were my companions.
The souvenir is also soliciting the visitor to comply with its standards or it’s at least to some degree framing the event – stating it’s an event to remember. It can be mass-produced (and even more vile as they grow and attempt to emulate the original) because they are everything but the Real experience. That’s even a weirder experience when Fischer’s plastic bottles were placed in the actual shop. Acting as real souvenirs. – Dafna Falk
In the Yardenit site, the holy and the touristic are meshed into a cell phone video documentation of the ungraspable moment of being reborn by baptizing in the river. The ever-moving, ever-changing metaphoric water is sealed into small plastic bottles and sold as holy water in the souvenir shop. I used this logic to create my merchandise, a plastic bottle in the shape of an embryo filled with the Jordan River water. It is about the unborn, about the potential, about the race of science to give us the choice to be above time. You can freeze your eggs. There are no consequences in this world. Israel is one of the most developed countries in fertility treatments. In America, it is one of the most controversial topics you have the pro-life and pro-choice movements and I have heard from my gynecologist that in the countries where laws about abortion have passed the status of these fertilized eggs is now changing. You might be forced to bring them all to life because they are already considered alive.
So how do you see the continuation of the project in the self-defense class?
In the second part of the exhibition, I deal with the documentation of a self-defense class and create a system of interventions and documentation around it that exchange the body with the cell phone and try to materialize our sexuality in the digital world. I imagine it as the collapsing of the romance into flesh, the naive bride is being undressed and the battle of love begins. Each phone shows the POV of the participants, the student, and the teacher. In this work, I wanted to observe our social-sexual interactions mediated through digital platforms. Sexual relations require our constant tension between devotion and maintaining power, between the individuals. The question of power and control arises periodically about female sexuality and the danger of being cheap – despicable.
In Israel, the Red Cross is a red David star. I was trying to imagine the end point of the story when a new potential savior approaches, a local man, with a red sunburn like a simplification of an ambulance and me as a sexy nurse playing sick.
“My David, a red Star of David,
flesh in your flesh –
A siren’s heart runs on the road,
My David, a red Star of David.”
What are your plans for the future?
I am organizing the final arrangements for the exhibition and planning an event of a self-defense class inside the space that will give women practical tools to protect themselves as a sort of performative event alongside the sculptures. Also, I’m preparing to move to the USA. I have been nominated for the Fulbright scholarship for MFA studies at the Rhode Island School of Design for the upcoming academic year.
The exhibition will open on May 1, 2024, at Barbur Gallery in Jerusalem
Special thanks to JCU and Sharon Golan for their support of the project.
Deborah Fischer www.instagram.com/debozaurus/
Lital Megidish www.instagram.com/litalmegidish/
Dafna Falk www.instagram.com/dafnabunny/
Matan Meirson & Raz Sintova www.instagram.com/nothingspersonall/
