+ 2019 ‘Three Times’, Art Cube Artist’s Studios, Jerusalem

Three Times Zohar Kawaharada Curator: Ilanit Konopny

“Walk through days without certainty. Speak words without meaning. Live in the darkness without seeing.”

Face to face. I can’t look away. Am I allowed to look? I wonder. Tears running down my face. I stare at the slaughtered body. The open flesh invites me to invade it: arteries, veins, capillaries, blood. I want to run away, I don’t want to know, but remain transfixed. She lures me to look.

It's beautiful, I say without realizing it, and immediately panic. I try to push her away. I do not want it. I do not want to feel the intensity of this pain. What is she showing me? murder? survival? struggle? defeat? control?

This is reality, she replies.

A martyr, Beelzebub, Seize the Day, post mortem? What is the metaphor? I insist. She is unwavering: This is reality. She stood there, smelled the dead body, witnessed the parasites flocking to feed on the fresh blood, even before the hunted flesh is skinned. She stood there in front of a leg stretched out in the body’s last and impossible cry for help. I want to refuse her. Not with me, not in the exhibition. But she already knows: on a small scale, in the dark, in the end and all the way back outside, the portrait will be etched and cast a fresh perspective on the pieces and outside the gallery. A living-dead sculpture, touching the real. Goya paints this lamb as harmonious, fairly balanced, shapes. It has a composition. But more important is its violent disruption. In order to reach this stillness of the painting (and of the future feast), brute force was excreted. Who knows – perhaps the slabs, or some of them, are from another lamb. The butcher may have grabbed what was in front of him. In the early 16th century, German painter Albrecht Dürer recommended painters to adopt combinations of this type as a way to achieve the ideal of beauty. “…choose people therefor who are regarded as beautiful, and such thou must copy with all possible diligence; for, from many different persons a knowledgeable man may collect something good throughout the parts of their members.” […] Goya saw the horrific side of this aesthetics. It is indifferent to the individual. She follows her father, accompanying the hunters. Goes out with them to the green expanses before the break of dawn. Four years go by. She becomes a hunter-photographer. Studying his moves, improving hers. Talking passionately before the event, preparing for the encounter. Like him, she assumes a role: a set outfit, a cooler, a hat, a tripod, a camera. As a photographer, she is very familiar with the relationship between hunting and photography – loading, aiming, shooting. Unlike hunters, her gaze lingers, devoid of a climax. She steps along the paths behind her father, watching him look at nature with his eyes, through the smartphone camera, through the barrel of the gun. She moves in his trails, just like him listening to the sounds of the jackals, the cracking of dry leaves, the snap of a twig, his breathing. Together they breathe the same air, see the same landscapes. She assimilated almost completely into his world. Until the moment when the father shoots the wild boar. Then, abruptly, she looks away from him, hiding behind a tree trunk. She understands, as painters do, the affinity between the body of the animal and the human body, the affinity between slaughter and war. She chooses the fields of carnage, the realms of conflict, listening to the use of military lingo, quotes from combats and battles with an enemy. I ask her for an explanation or motivation. Wrapped inside her DNA molecule there is another coil encoded by Israel's wars. She is willing to reveal only the flesh, the quartered body. This death, she tells me, demands that I look at it with all of its cruelty. She writes: To be blinded in order to see. With her, I look at a hunting scene dated to 11,000 BCE: hunters of all ages wielding arches by a body of an animal pierced with arrows. I am repulsed and fascinated by the blood that flowed from the throat and pooled at the end of the boar’s nose. We read together: Man most likely first started painting with animal blood. Animals were the first metaphor: a horse, a deer, a bird, a snake. The first drawings were of animals. Animals served man as symbols – a way to map the world and make sense of it, an expression of our relation. Until the post-industrial era, where animals are perceived as lacking a spiritual-linguistic world, as raw material in the food industry and as a body for conducting scientific experiments; Where animals were relegated to the margins of culture and physical space. Animals became spectacles, shrouded by existential impossibility. In the accompanying ideology, animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.
Photographing an animal, then, is a shared exposure to disappearance; Shared exposure to the dwindling light, like so many things that live thanks to it, including the photographic act itself. Again, photography is the medium for exposing disappearances [...] Something of the horror of that time, photography shows us, can be traced to the here and now. She shows me a huge window in a living room, an open balcony in a skyscraper, a concrete room. She writes: I seal in order to see. Time after time after time she demarcates areas in the world and isolates them. She chooses spaces brimming with local history and existential complexity. Within these symbolic sites, she suspends the order of life, reorganizes the laws of territory, demands a personal, social, and cultural reckoning. She identifies or constructs spaces that follow the principle of Camera Obscura: a space impervious to light with a pinhole through which the rays of light enter and cast the images of the outside world. From sunrise to sunset she tapes strips of black wallpaper, veiling the view from an east facing window overlooking the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights. Half a day is crammed into eleven minutes of viewing. Like Sisyphus, she works in cycles: climbing up and down the ladder, taking liquids in and out of her body. Before the moon comes up, the attempts to obstruct and delineate a border fail. The window will not be fully covered. She moves on to peeling and taping the black strips from one side to the other, in pursuit of an impossible obstruction of the multiple holes. Trying to look at areas of contention by hindering the gaze. Light, she tells me, is never coincidental or naïve. It is meant to expose, to show, but it always ends up in a violent place where it scorches, blinds, destroys the integrity of the image. On the twenty-fifth floor of Dizengoff Tower in Tel Aviv, she tries in vain to demarcate and black out an outdoor service balcony without a rail, fence, or bars. She invites a performance artist to react to the space she created. The wind threatens to rip off the black sheets of plastic, allowing the light in with blinding force. His body feels the gusts of wind up in the sky, his legs burning with the intrusive light, which casts doubt on their contact with the ground. He expresses the tension between ascension and grounding. His body moves slowly, trying to keep a fixed distance of at least 28 mm between his heels and the ground. The sounds of the Israeli environment permeate the action space of the Japanese man. The two cultural identities touch one another's aesthetics. She lives and photographs in a state of over-exposure. Looking at the controlled, isolated, disciplined space, which is subject to constant tension. She longs to free it (and herself) from a predetermined identity, to replace a single truth with uncertainty, doubt, and the experience. If one observes the movements of a human being in possession of a camera (or of a camera in possession of a human being), the impression given is of someone lying in wait. This is the ancient act of stalking which goes back to the palaeolithic hunter in the tundra. Yet photographers are not pursuing their game in the open savanna but in the jungle of cultural objects, and their tracks can be traced through this artificial forest. The acts of resistance on the part of culture, the cultural conditionality of things, can be seen in the act of photography, and this can, in theory, be read off from photographs themselves. Through the body – the flesh, the bones, the sensory organs – she marks a space, delineates boundaries. I am looking with her at the liminal spaces. The external blends with the internal, the border is transient, permeable, and forming. A public space turns into a private space, a domestic space into a political space, a military space into an artistic space. In a massive concrete structure on the slopes of Mount Carmel, surrounded by darkness, at a delayed pace, she turns on the spot – and throughout the entire circle, exposes the film at sporadic intervals. Moving her body in synch with the camera, she creates a panorama of a chase. Without control on what the film captures, random encounters of reflection are captured in the darkness, memory shadows of actions that had taken place there. The internal, filmed space is used as an urban warfare training facility. The external space, which trickles into it, is a nature reserve where wild boar hunting is permitted.