Miqlat, 2016
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris, France
The sculpture Miqlat (i.e. shelter in Hebrew) is a life-sized bronze cast on an obsolete public bomb shelter, which had been abandoned as the derelict remains of what appeared like an urban blister on the architectural fabric of Tel Aviv.
This project sought to examine a link in my work where openings, holes, apertures, tunnels and other sites and thresholds unfold.
In the early 1990s, Israel’s Home Front Command had developed defenses against missile attacks. However, by privatizing services that the state had formerly provided, civilians were left responsible for their own defense within their everyday surroundings. The neo-liberal class gap halted the formation of new structures and refrained from maintaining old public shelters, thus overlooking the need for survival in times of war.
This is the narrative that I aimed to give voice to in this work. The bronze shaft was held by a robust iron construction which is aesthetically unpretentious, especially in comparison to the intricacy of the traces in the bronze. The two openings on both ends and levels of the work were exposed and offered themselves up for casual examination, like a miniscule archaeo-zoological dinosaur from pre-1967 Hebrew Zionism.
Curator: Fanny Schulmann
