Hemmo unpicks the boundaries of what was considered the bon ton in those years, and offers a new reading of issues of identity, narrative, heritage, and continuity. Her action is twofold: it not only seeks to re-read (and rewrite) the canon by including forgotten works, but also challenges the relegation of handicrafts to minor status in the art field, despite their central role in consolidating cultural and national affiliation in the early years after independence.
In the current exhibition, Hemmo has constructed three personal monuments based, in part, on the legacy of the architect Arnona Axelrod (1935–2019, Israel) and painter Aharon Kahana (1905, Germany–1967, Israel), alongside additional collective cultural fathers and mothers.
Wall Sculpture consists of two low and overlapping wall elements facing each other, with a space between them. Hemmo divests the sculpture of the monumental, heroic appearance typical of many memorial sites in Israel, offering instead a sculptural ethics that redefines the relationship between ideology, form, and scale.
Embedded in one of the interior sides of the sculpture is Tapestry, a textile element akin to an archaeological relic that has faded in the sun. Through it, Hemmo seeks to highlight the role of tapestries in the history of local crafts.
Bracelet is a tiny, dusty fossil-like fragile testimonial to the cycles of life and death. Hemmo has fashioned a piece of jewelry that, in a mythological, material-physical way, realizes the connection between art and the local soil. The dust from which it was cast was collected on dirt roads near the border security fence in the Beit She’an Valley, and then mixed with volcanic ash from the vicinity of the village of Kerem Maharal, at the foot of Mt. Carmel. The use of dust serves Hemmo’s aesthetic, ethical, and political stance born of her own personal life story and that of the Middle East.
Shelf Sculpture is like a space within a space, or an exhibition within an exhibition, it presents an extensive web of progeny-ware of feminine crafts, embodying local aesthetic elements of material, form, and ornamentation. The line of objects reflects a (life) line of Israeli pottery produced from 1950 to 1980 in ceramic factories that no longer exist: Harsa, Lapid, Kedar, Kadan, Palceramic, Keramos, Karnat, and others.
Between archaeological remains and new scaffolding, Hemmo lays the foundation for structures whose development has been nipped in the bud. Well, here is a tri-lateral world. As small and large as a father, it eludes every cage and seeks to be a home among the broken paths of the Middle East.
[1] The exhibition title is a quotation from Ocean Vuong’s poem, “No One Knows the Way to Heaven,” Time Is a Mother (New York: Penguin, 2022), p. 90.
Image: Irit Hemmo, Bracelet, 2024, dust, volcanic ash, gemstone, dia. 7.5 (photo: Tal Nisim)
Less Reading...
