In Return - knitted installation, installation view at Dvir gallery, 2011. Photos: Elad Sarig
This project probes into the interrelations between infancy, Holocaust and sexuality. The theme bonding the knitted entities is the deconstruction and rebuilding of a personal and national identity. The entities derive from infants' rooms and memories, and include:
* A couple of tormented "Pacifiers", male and female - Each mutated by its own darkness and survival.
* A concentration camp crib, with its' baby golden tooth - Insinuating that our seemingly warm and protecting cradles and origins, may as well serve as our prisons and conditionings.
* An uber fuzzy, colourful swastikas Baby Blanket, with its daunting eyeballs and hemmed in by blond and grey braided pigtails - Acknowledging the interwoven smothering of traumas and memories we're being nursed with through our grannies squared patchworks.
* And, inspired by Paul Celan, a "Grave in the wind" mobile, compiled of an enlarged baby bottle dripping black milk, a yellow star of David, sex organs and an eye weight - Pivoting on equilibrium between texts, contexts, pretexts and texture.
These artefacts are submitted to a conceptual and cosmetic transformation, and scaled as for an adult observer to feel like an infant before them.
The name of the exhibition "In Return", drawn from Freudian practices, stresses going back in time, to one's primal traumas, in order to transmute pain and overcome grief. This project suggests that implementing these practices also on the genealogically collective levels, could be the only way out of the violent vicious circles of societal traumas induced by historical policies and economies of denial.
In Hebrew children's tongue "in return" means retaliation, thus reestablishing a status quo of recurring violence - This project strives to disrupt it.
