Territorial Bodies

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From the Catalogue of the Exhibition

The 13^th of June 2007 – a hot and humid day on the corner of Gordon and Dizzengoff streets in Tel-Aviv. It’s an intersection that holds promise in any direction you would choose to walk – Gordon brimming with the country’s leading art galleries and some welcoming cafés, Dizzengoff offering a dazzling array of restaurants, upscale clothing stores and small, crowded shop where no one but the owner knows what goes on. Buses whiz by, expelling exhaust fumes that no nose filter could withstand. Here, to this fabulous intersection, is where I would take you if you joined my visit to Israel.
We would walk down the pavement shaded by Ficus trees shedding their sweet, sticky fruit onto the 24-hour cafés and enjoy the fresh pastries; I could read you the day’s newspaper headlines, as always portending a deterioration of the political situation. Between sips of coffee we could hurry on and enjoy the wealth of galleries and exhibition spaces flooding the city and try – through them – to understand this place’s driving force.

This is how the idea for this exhibition materialized – from my visit to Israel, an invitation to visit the physical territory where art is continually created – leading in turn to the amassing of the first, skeletal collection and later a more coherent body of works. Meeting the artists and choosing from their works allowed me to clarify their interlinking characteristics: the main thread joining them is the subject of identity, examined through relations of Body and Territory; a complex relation that raises social and political questions of borders and self-determination, questions about the past, about Family and about Tradition, as well as about the power of Love and Death.
It was also a natural choice for me: I could say that my choice of subject – that of identity – came out of my own complex and ambivalent attitude towards the Netherlands, the foreign country where I have chosen to reside at present. Far from the country where I was born and raised, I find myself living in one territory while mentally and emotionally occupying another.
Territorial Bodies, then, invites you to examine the complex relations between Body and Territory, and their place in the definition of identity within a complex reality. I chose to write the text that follows in order to expand on the subject of belonging, which I see as a key signifier of this concept: belonging to a Country, to a Family, to a Gender (with its accompanying fashion edicts) and to a Culture, represented in art history.

Relations of Body and Land–Territory
In Israel, a state with fluid borders, and one of the most complex societies in the world – one that bridges unimaginably extreme communal forms – artists create artworks that on the one hand deal with their complex attitude towards the place, and on the other correspond with the global art field. The link between Body and Land-Territory has been endowed with an almost holy, if always conflicted, aura. Growing up there, one is habitually told stories of the heroism of brave soldiers who gave their lives for the protection of the Homeland. Graduating from high school, one is drafted into the army, where an ambivalent connection to the country – fraught with heroism, holiness and a horrible waste of human life – is cemented. This is the sacrifice one has to make for living in Israel, the “blood connection” to the Land that is required of one.
Immortalizing this charged connection, Erez Israeli attempts to grasp the moment of death and represent it in his artwork. He returns, time and again, to cemeteries, following the ceremonies of farewell from a loved one in funerals: the crying, the praying, and the laying of the wreath. Using diverse materials, he reconstructs the moment of Loss and its accompanying symbols of ruin. A different relationship, though no less charged, is the one evident in the works of Manar Zuabi. As a Palestinian resident of Nazareth (a communal Arab-Jewish city in Israel’s jurisdiction), she views Territory simultaneously as protection and as oppression. In her video included in this exhibition, she is signifying her choice: her Territory simultaneously imprisons and gives refuge.
The connection to the Land in Israel gains further meanings in relation to its rich past, with many areas ‘drenched’ with biblical stories. A good example is the Dead Sea, best known for the story of Lot’s wife, who, while turning back for the last time to see her city going up in flames, was turned into a pillar of salt. It is in this region, so rich with different peoples’ stories and cultures, that Sigalit Landau weaves her chain of watermelons, finally bridling herself as a link in the chain. The spiral-chain rotates slowly, gradually disappearing without leaving a trace, its temporary presence in the region added as another layer in its history.
Another important facet of Israeli history is the subject of immigration: the massive waves of immigrants in the mid-20^th century have actually shaped its current social makeup. Far from exceptional, nostalgia for a distant home and memories of another environment are nowadays actually a key feature of Israelis’ connection to the Land. Philip Rentzer, who immigrated to Israel with his family as a child, deals in his work with his dim memories of his childhood home. He creates spaces for an absent body, signifying a place that is not the Home itself but rather its essence, its signified paradigm. The distant home was often actually a painful place, but as time wore on, the traces of this pain have faded, and all that is left is an endless longing.
Migrations of large populations, by necessity or choice, are spurred by political, social and economic changes and result in large-scale demographic changes. Thus, relations to a new land and the examination of the concept of Home – both as private territory and as a facet of identity – have troubled many artists who have migrated to foreign countries.

Family Histories
Many of the works in this exhibition examine the concepts of Family and familial relationships, but define them in somewhat unorthodox ways. The obvious nuclear family is supplanted by alternative structures that however take on its traditional roles. Uri Katzenstein, for example, shows a group united in a family of sorts; their affinity, while not a genealogical one, stems rather from common interests and distresses. The figures – all embodying the image of the artist himself – may have distinguishing traits under their clothes, but to highlight the sense of a reproduction they have no bellybuttons. And although each figure has unique outward characteristics – their particular dress, posture and the ways they are situated in the space – they are uneasily reminiscent of genetic, or perhaps social, replication. Appearing once more on video, they are seen in a neutral interior, moving about, forming relationships and taking part in rituals that, although alluding to familiar social practices like marriage, remain implicit and abstract. These actually depict a relationship between the artist and himself, a multiplicity of identities with the same figure. Reproduction for Katzenstein means security, knowing that of a group of like-bodied individuals surrounds him.
Another kind of “enlarged” nuclear family is featured in the work of Ziv Ben Dov, a lifelong Kibbutz resident. A key factor in Kibbutz life, the fact that children slept communally instead of in their parents’ homes, has produced relations between Kibbutz members sometimes resembling a kind of expanded family. An echo of this can be seen in Ben Dov’s “casting actions”, where he is aided by his neighbors, members of his Kibbutz, his family and friends – all of whom have no prior experience in casting work. His sculptural work speaks to a specific time and space and a specific intimacy. Ben Dov also makes use of pieces of cloth to wraps his models, obfuscating the contours of their bodies, and creating a new space between them that redefines the space they are in. His work included in this exhibition and entitled Brothers features at its center a cast of himself flanked by his two siblings. All three connected by a cast sheet of cloth, they are leaning against or supporting each other, with what takes place under the cloth remaining out of sight.
Buthina Abu Milhem, a resident of an Arab-Israeli village, deals with traditional family relations in a Muslim family. In the past, the women would get together and embroider patterns characteristic to the region onto the garments they had made for family events. The older women presided over the younger, imparting of their wisdom, chanting and teaching them the handicraft. Nostalgic for those customs and what they represent in her culture, Abu Milhem in her way also embroiders: cutting parts of old garments and dresses, including one of her grandmother’s, she reattaches them to new garments she sews and tops them with sewing pins. Now, instead of coaxing to the touch, the pins signify the threat of pain to anybody who would come too close. And what she was taught orally, she now writes again and again onto the garment, the repetition resulting in a kind of ornament. Abu Milhem can be seen as adding her story to her grandmother’s, but unlike her grandmother’s, her dress isn’t meant to worn. This is her personal statement vis-à-vis her culture, her own narrative on the link between the generations and its severing.

Body – Private Territory, Gender and the Grotesque
From the moment we enter into the world, our bodies are the basic, primary territory belonging exclusively to ourselves. From it, we emerge to deal with and scout other territories, always finally returning to it. Nowadays, with the idea of the care for the body omnipresent in every cultural surface – on the street, on television, in the press – everyone is busily trying to convince us to consume cosmetics, haute cuisine, perfumes, fashion accessories, hairdos and different body treatments. And with every last vestige of modesty annihilated, we are encouraged, indeed demanded, to pamper and indulge our bodies. What was once considered respectable and positive is seen today as a form of negligence, to the extent that it can actually clash with social codes. This is another expression of the Western-consumerist worldview, which, from its central position, enforces strict rules of visibility.
Our culture’s role model is an eternally youthful person, with a hairless body showing no signs of ageing or, god forbid, wear; exactly like the figure born out of a conch in Eli Gur-Arie’s piece. Its sparkling smooth skin, its prepubescent proportions and its gender-ambiguity is further heightened by the fantastically rich world with which it is surrounded. This world also pertains to an aspiration to beauty, richness and abundance.
Gilad Ratman alsosuggests a fantastic environment, although primordial, chaotic and unsettling: a still pool of ink, reflecting the figures standing around it and their surroundings. It is unclear whether these fantastic surroundings bore them or will be their undoing. Ratman’s wax figures offer a different human interface with savage, genderless, creatures, created as if before the separation into sexes took place.
The deconstruction of gender characteristics and their hybridization as a way of dealing with sexual identity is one of the themes in Mirit Cohen Caspi’s works. She photographs body organs of members of both genders – fingers, backs, nipples, feet – processes the photos, and digitally prints them on fabrics, later cutting and sewing the pieces into sculpture. The body, disembodied of its original form, is re-embodied in a new image. Rather than simply blurry, its gender identity is a symbiosis of body parts and clothing articles that have coalesced into one unit, one “new” body.
Clothes also have the power to represent and define, in a word to construct a character’s identity. The clothes painted on Zoya Cherkassky’s sculpted figures highlight their inarticulateness and further highlight their grotesque appearance. She has cynically chosen figures representing mainstream occupations and ridiculed them, using the tools of their respective trades. The sculptures’ doll-like proportions actually counteract that most basic feeling we get when we see a doll – the desire to play with it. Cherkassky has crafted our unease by choosing, as the butt of her sarcastic ridicule, daily figures – so much so that any one of us might be next in line for her derisively contemptuous treatment. 

References to Art History
Many of the artworks in this exhibition reference well know pieces from the history of art, some in an obvious manner and others in a more complex or implicit way. The next group of works clearly corresponds with art history, whether through the staging of poses or through the referencing of classical sculptural material.
Shuli Nachshon consciously cites art-historical sources. Scar, her work included in this exhibition, shows her ‘directing’ herself into Classical postures while wearing robes reminiscent of the draperies of Roman statues. As in most of her works, Nachshonhere also conducts a personal rituals centering on man’s link to Nature: her rituals are intimate, feminine procedures, uninformed by religious or traditional rules. From them she derives the healing power she then uses both to combat her Cancer and to create her artistic work. Her ritual here begins with preparing her make up set, positioning her chair and mirror at just the right angle and fitting the lighting onto the set. The work itself contains her healing method: instead of hiding the mastectomy she has undergone, she bears her affected torso proudly so that all can see the scar signifying the ordeal, “processing” it into an ornament that she proudly displays.
Having felt powerless over her body during her illness, she is now in full control of it. Working on the physical scar as well as on the one within, this is one Amazon that won’t give in to her surroundings’ demands to hide her mastectomy. Rejecting the offered prosthetics, she sits proudly beautiful in front of us.
Photographers Galia Gur-Zeev and Amir Weinberg also reference classical art, but more than thematically, they do so through the materials they work with. By giving up the figurative, representational ‘advantages’ of photography, they both arrive at works that simulate the surface of classical sculpture. Making it almost impossible to clearly make out the details of the bodies they use – their wrinkles, folds and skin textures – they add these up to a seemingly homogenous surface that is misleadingly reminiscent of marble or stone. “I sculpt with light,” Weinberg says, “light is the material out of which I make the figure.” The contrast between a white figure and a black background in both artists’ work highlights its ‘frozen’ motion, presenting the figure as a monolithic unit.
The permanent collection of the Beelden aan Zee Museum, exhibited in the halls adjacent to the Territorial Bodies show, includes portraits of important figures in Dutch political and cultural life. One of Gil Shachar’s works has been placed just beside them – a cast of his own face, paintbrush in mouth, immortalizing his figure using the traditional tool of his trade. Situating his work there was calculated to highlight the similarities and disparities between his work and the older portraits. As is common in the history of sculpted portraiture, Shachar has immortalizes his own figure at a certain moment in time. The main difference here, however, is his choice of materials: he uses wax instead of the traditional stone, bronze or marble, materials whose durability denotes power and strength. Shachar’s wax, by comparison, contains the more human characteristics of fragility and translucence.
All of Shachar’s portraits share an interesting feature – the fact that his figures’ eyes (the most vivid part of the face) are depicted as closed. Were they shown open, the figures’ resulting gaze would have been a constant one, denoting death. It is because they are closed that the sculptures can remain ‘alive’ forever, or perhaps more precisely in the moment we see it – beyond time, beyond a specific moment in the life of either the ‘real’ figure or the sculpted one.

The works collected for this exhibition afford us another glance on the idea of sculpture as a whole. Just as two-dimensional images can depict three-dimensional ideas, the adverse is also true, as has already been remarked above in connection with Cohen Caspi’swork,Laundry. An analogous illusion is the ability to imbue non-traditional materials with the attributes of their loftier traditional counterparts, such as in the case of photographs ‘masquerading’ as marble or a living person ‘directed’ into a ‘living sculpture’.
Other important points of reference here are the subjects of time and of dimensions. The idea of time is a given in sculptural work – finishing the piece at a certain time, the artist only then reveals it to the viewers. Video pieces, however, are an opportunity to examine this assumption and spread the time axis along the entire creative process, as in Zuabi’s work In Between.
Our ability to view a static sculpture from all sides is part of our experience of it, but this can also be turned on its head, as in the works of Sigalit Landau – where, for instance, the Dead Sea seems to engulf us. This is also true of Katzenstein’s work,wheresculpted figures (all images of the artist himself) come to life in the accompanying video, seemingly allowing us to share in the experience of ‘being a sculpture’ and seducing us to take part in the artwork itself.

Epilogue
Returning to the beginning of this journey, I could say that the introduction to this text could also be its Epilogue: a visit to Israeli exhibition spaces or a walk through this one offers a real-time decoding of that Territory. Israel is a place where the feeling of alienation and non-belonging is intermingled with a possessive fanaticism and nostalgia for better times, and every possible space between the three.
The images shown in Territorial Bodies speak to a local development – the art created in the last few years in Israel, a place that is remapping itself both inwardly and outwardly. The word Territory, recharged in every social, cultural and political debate, signifies new spaces for discussion and new contexts of identity and self determination in the work of these artists.

Acknowledgements:
First and foremost, It is my pleasurable duty to thank Jan Teeuwisse, director, and Alessandra Laitempergher, curator, of the Beelden aan Zee Museum, without whose generosity, active initiative and involvement this show would not have been possible. They were, of course, aided by the institution’s tireless staff, to whom I am also grateful.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the artists who allowed me a glimpse of their fascinating, creative world. Special thanks go to the different collectors who lent works to the show, as well as Diana Dalal and Zaki Rosenfeld of Rosenfeld Gallery, Noemi Givon of Givon Gallery, Alon, Amnon and the staff of Alon Segev Gallery and Dietmar and Christian Löhrl of Löhrl Gallery.
Finally, my special heartfelt thanks go to those who gave of themselves, each in his or her own way, for the success of the show: Nurit Malkin, Doron and Marian Livnat, Rivka Saker and Guja and Arnold Troostwijk. Thank you all.