Einav Zilber

Power and Glory

At the center of the exhibition are material figures – a bull, a woman, a dart thrower, and a bee – objects which are also its subjects. They are packed and compressed into abandoned honeycombs, with a woman’s figure in the middle – she is the actress Anna Carina, the muse of the auteur Jean-Luc Goddard. Her face represents the face of Woman in cinema. She is the old lady wearing her fading youth as a death mask, old age itself who had outwitted death and the cult of youth by achieving eternity, positioned here as an icon dipped in honey. Her image returns in the projection of the dance from Goddard’s film, in the parking lot: it is performed as the Dance of the Bumblebee, this time in my image, transferred into encircling motions by shooting from a car moving around me. The composition searches for a center, like the sharp eye of a dart thrower focusing on a target. It is the hub around which we dance, which we worship, desire, and thank, but at the same time we sacrifice it, sting or puncture it, or are repelled by it. The exhibition is constructed like an altar. However, instead of gods and idols, miracles and tales from the visual vocabulary of the religious ritual, the altar’s panels are dotted with expressions of secularity which has consumed its ritualistic origins. The work is about temura -the ritualistic change from a tradition defined by its segregation from the daily routine into a characteristic that can be embodied in everyday life. Unlike traditional altar paintings, this work does not look to tell a tale or immortalize it. It focuses on producing a plot concerning the actual act of looking. In this sense photography is not only the medium of producing the work, it is the state and the reality around which and for whom the altar has been erected. The rules of alteration or replacement are based on a phrase from Leviticus 27:10: He shall not alter it, nor change it, a good for a bad, or a bad for a good: and if he shall at all change beast for beast, then it and the exchange thereof shall be holy. The rules of alteration in Jewish tradition forbid the exchange of a beast designated for sacrifice for another one. However, if the designated beast is replaced, both beasts are sacred. The exchanged one is called temura.