History of Silence – Dvora Morag
In the exhibition “History of Silence” Dvora Morag deals with the concept of the home, yet places before us a house empty of people. The main hall is covered with black and white paintings, architectural in presence and size, from a series of works called “Holding My Breath”. An inner room situated in the center of the exhibition space contains a continuous, richly colored painting called “Gathering My Time”. Beyond that is a light table of domestic furniture scale with images of boats floating on a lake.
The concept of the home is examined in several ways: as a covering shell, a mantle and a place to be fortified within. Thus one continuous colorful painting creates an architectural installation of space within the gallery hall that exhibits the series of black paintings on its walls. The concept of the home as a concrete, firm, solid place can be destabilized as implied by the juxtaposition of photographic images of boats on a lake. The boats sinking in the lake look like they have been abandoned long ago.
Morag’s paintings in this exhibition develop from photographs of her own home living space. Here the physical place Morag paints in her works are defined by silence, lack of activity, and expanses with no people present. The motif of light is the work’s driving force: it defines space, activity; it is what sculpts the space into a complete, substantial architectural object. The focus of light in the two works is also the mechanism of exposes a sense of emptiness; the place of the lonely in the domestic scheme.
“Gathering My Time”
Here “the home” directly and indirectly touches the political. If Morag’s paintings generally presented spaces and objects from her home in the center of Tel Aviv, the source of the striped painting “Gathering My Time” is the Yediyot Acharonot photograph by photographer Saul Golan of soldiers, a moment at rest… a moment entrenched, in a Tul Karem Palestinian residence after the murder of Rehavam Ze’evi in 2001.
Morag took the photographed image and “civilianized it”, possessing and redefining it as the private space of her home. In this painted segment the soldier figure appears armed with binoculars looking from the house, through the venetian blind slits, from inside out… remaining the only figure appearing in the entire exhibition.
Morag began embroidering each stroke of her brush, marking time on the striped paintings from early 2000, and has worked on them for about eight years. Observation of her concept of home is found in her past, in a discourse with family source materials and history. In her paintings she tries to grasp at the mundane, the simple, the functional, the documentary, the banal… to what defines the physical space as domestic space. Her earthbound space experiences an emotional metamorphous through her works. The work seems to capture and erase images, footprints and traces of place. When she was a child she found a black and white photograph in the family album… a photo from the Dachau extermination camp. It was never spoken of and she never asked about it. The photograph repeatedly filled her with both terror and curiosity. To look at it she developed a way of concealing yet peaking through the fingers of her hand. When her fingers were spread open the frightening figure would appear segmented, as if her finger coverings would dull the image’s might. The striped paintings refer to this mechanism of screening what is seen and thus enabling life in the presence of harsh reality— a mechanism she acquired as a child.
Through the continuous striped painting, Morag creates a visual impediment for the viewer. This strategy defines the viewer’s observation of the work as if peeking through slits. This peeking is twofold. First the spectator looks between and beyond the slits, and secondly the slits function as a long continuous opening to another place… a peek into a situation situated at eye level.
Walking inside the inner room, whose measurements were constructed according to the long painting’s size, activates the body and the viewing, reminiscent of childhood games of walking alongside fences, as children often do. What’s missing here is the stick held in the hand, sliding along the fence, making noise, continuous monotonous sounds. However, Morag’s childhood games were build from sights and fences made of memory, fences of disruption, between what was told and what was not, narrowing the motivation to decipher surrounding reality. In this painting Morag is attached to the physical in her life — objects, signs of simple presence. The objects in her life are signs connecting symbolic configurations known as homeyness. Here paintings founded on photographs create a distancing, call to turn the snapshot into documentation, like documentarian proof, in an attempt to construct memory through painting.
“Holding My Breath”
The series “Holding My Breath” is a group of domestic architecture paintings from the last year. Hung from ceiling to floor, the paintings are made with white oil sticks on heavy black material and were created especially for the exhibition space of the Artist’s House Gallery. In contrast to the colored works made in layers, this series of works is made with light touches, very direct, without possibility to correct or erase. These paintings are based on night photographs, inviting us to enter Morag’s private space in a different manner. This space, free of activity or objects presents us with a threshold, a path and passageway. The scale of the works seems to contain the observer, leaving him expectant, alert and raises the necessity to ask: what’s there, what’s beyond the open door? As when standing before a mirror, only the observer of the work can contain and define the “there”, the possibility of “beyond here” and give his own personal answer.
The focus of tension and power in this group of works is built on the sense of the “there”. Morag’s ‘The place beyond” moves between memory, the past tense or perhaps a possibility of the present —to what exists, is present beyond the door and must be exposed.
In the movie “Hide and Seek” Michael Haneke shows how the outside world penetrates inside the house through the openings, awakening memories from the unsettled past that intrude on the present life of the hero. In Morag’s works the openings and passageways function as things that demand conscious attention.
The photographs of boats “Swallowing the Words”
These photographs that Morag took in China in 1993 were a source of inspiration for several sculptural works in the past. The image itself in loaded with double meanings in floating or sinking. Similar to the series of paintings “Holding My Breath” the inner space functions here as a threshold, as a place where situations meet. The inner area is thick and teeming with vegetive growth, the only water seen is the water inside the boat. In contrast to the ground or other stable surfaces, the inner area presents itself as an unstable surface that can’t hold a person’s weight.
The exhibition exposes us to the sound of silence. Does silence have a sound? In Alain Resnais’s film “Last Year in Marienbad: the narrator reads a text from the writer Alain Robbe-Grillet: “Silence is worse than death and the whispers worse than the silence. The walls were always there and also the silence… Words were not spoken so as not to awaken emotions. They were signs everywhere— silence, silence… I hear last year’s voice”
Mali De-Kalo
Exhibition curator
