Labor Pains
Labor Pains, the new group exhibition at the Givat
Haviva Art Gallery, presents 27 artists and 50 works, accompanied by a sense of
urgency, loss, and trauma that can also become enormous forces for healing,
reparation, and birth. What
birth? The birth of life, the birth of social relations and the birth of new
fabrics in our society.
The exhibition deals with the connection between
trauma and transformation, and with the long way there: the pain, the
treatment, the Sisyphean effort, the release, the transformation. The healing. It
takes place amidst unimaginable war and pain, most of it untreated. When there
is treatment, a renewed trust in humanity and its motives becomes possible.
The cycle of birth processes, cycles of life and
death and the developing human awareness, which knows how to move from a
constricted consciousness of fear towards an expanding consciousness, moves in
the exhibition between three axes, all three revolving around another axis, the
one of life and death.
The axis of fear stretches from conceptions of birth and parentage of communal living
in the kibbutz of old, through myths that exalt sacrifice, war and death,
silencing mechanisms for parts of society and the traumas that accompany them
all, to the anxious and despairing outlook of the younger generation.
The axis of change, a process whose essence is unknown: it includes
waiting, endurance, and anticipation; it goes through pain, accompanied by life
and death, with the hope of finding life at the end. The axis of change is the
axis of transformation that carves thin layers in the material towards a new
spirit.
The axis of birth - new life is created, passing between dimensions, abstract geometric
shapes can suddenly have different names, so that an arabesque is a Star of
David and a Star of David is an arabesque. The longing for beauty within the
horror will dissipate it and a new mental-perceptual future can arrive.
The birth process involves many partners. It
succeeds when they are visible, see each other and cooperate.
The three axes are always revolving on the axis of
life and death that has been
hovering over us so much more this year. When a significant part of humanity
can clearly, realistically see that peace means mainly security, we can
conclude that this is a time of struggle of extreme forces.
Some of the works speak in one or two axes, some
speak all three. Personal, social, political, gender, therapeutic and
socio-psychological views are found in them in various intersections. It is
interesting to think what space would be created if all the threads could be connected.
Our society, in this country at this time, deeply
connected to the land, is wounded and in pain. Even if not everyone hurts for
the same reasons, still everyone hurts. Our mental distress today also stems
from the social-psychological-sociological dimension resulting from our
inability to feel cohesion, togetherness. We feel lonely and alienated.
Why is all this happening? Where does it lead,
where can it lead? The tectonic
plates are moving now. In Jewish history, the Temple was destroyed twice,
resonating the current situation in the modern State of Israel after about 70
years. The process of the disintegration of the state as we knew it is
happening before our eyes. It can lead to an end, but it can also lead to the
creation of a new structure that will correct historical mistakes by
understanding, acknowledging, and restructuring them.
In an even broader perspective, we are at the
threshold of a new millennium. According to many theories, ancient times were
dominated by women, while since the beginning of written history we know a
society dominated by men. The current era, also called the third millennium, provides
an opportunity as well as an imperative to connect the two with a whole new set
of tools. We are also in this storm.
Life is all contained in the beauty of a seashell,
or, if you will, in the spiral pattern of a snail's shell. When we look at the particular we can learn so
much about the whole - a whole that is just a collection of many particulars.
How does birth happen today and how can it happen? How can dealing with your birth trauma as an adult
change your life, the lives of all of us?
How do we give birth to a society that can be shared on a different
basis?
Humans, the earth (and animals), male and female,
together create life and reality. The exhibition ponders the mysterious secret called
life and the meaning of humanity. It also looks at war and catastrophes, and at
peace as a moderate path. In the broadest view, one that contains all the
sources, the power relations, the variety of opinions and extreme views; one
that manages to expand even beyond the limits of the material and the accepted
ways of thinking, perhaps a truer picture can be grasped, with which we can
move on to the next level.
In the end, the exhibition is a collection of moments,
sometimes fragments of an experience, stimulating and calming the mind that wishes to shout and to allow silence at the
same time. Mainly it would like to offer a common platform for pain, for
healing and for new movement.
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