2023b


  
The Altar Hearth, 1st Movement: Look. A Boy.

"Look. A Boy." is the first work in “the altar hearth” tetralogy. It is a site-specific work made for a large commercial space in Bloomfield Stadium, Tel Aviv, awaiting rental in a “pre-finished” state.

The work consists of two ceiling lamp shades, one made of stone and the other of glass, turned into bowls and filled with water to the brim. In each floats a photograph, which gradually dissolves until the image disappears. What remains at the end of the process are photo material fragments that sank to the bottom of the bowl and a partially floating photographic paper. One image was a self-portrait, and the other a landscape photograph from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The photographs were taken from an album of pictures I shot during a trip to Poland in 2001, when I was in 11th grade. I was called back to these photo albums by chance, yet urgently, when my mother informed me that she intended to get rid of them. While flipping through the album, I encountered a portrait of myself with a slightly open mouth, a photo that I had not taken. I felt I knew the boy in the photograph, but i could not recognize him, and he, in turn, did not stop gazing at me. I wanted to find a way back to that boy.

I placed the images in the bowls shortly before the opening of the exhibition, so the duration of the exhibition was not long enough for the images to fully dissolve. At the end of the exhibition, I performed a "transfer ceremony" of the bowls back to the studio, documented on video. In my studio, I preserved the bowls until the dissolution of the images was complete after several weeks, and the boy disappeared.

The date on the self-portrait was September 9th, and on the Auschwitz image, it was September 11th, 2001. One could imagine that the boy’s open mouth was due to the future yet to unfold.
components onyx stone lamp shade, milk glass lamp shade, water, two photographs chemically developed from film exhibited group exhibition “gate 5”, Bloomfield stadium, Tel aviv, Israel ceremony documentation Idan Sestieri Lavie exhibition documentation Daniel Hanoch exhibition supported by Tel Aviv Yafo Municipality Arts Department, The Sports Palaces of Tel Aviv Yafo, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design

Thank you Idan Sestieri Lavie, Menahem Goldenberg, Tamar Erez