Haunting

“Everything begins by the apparition of a specter.”
(Jacques Derrida)

“Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.”

(Avery Gordon)

“Your silence will not protect you. […] What are the words you do not yet have?”

(Audre Lorde)

Over the past year, nine artists and two curators gathered into a temporary community of shared learning with and about ghosts. Through reading theory, holding virtual visits at the studios of the group members, and games, rituals, and conversations about lived experiences, we collected tools and composed a language we could use for speaking with ghosts. We haunt, in the active sense, and are not haunted, because we chose to try to dwell in the presence of ghosts rather than banish them immediately; we agreed to listen to them through personal and collective traumas, and through what we tried – but failed – to forget, repress, or remain silent about. They emerged from childhood memories, from family stories, as metaphors, as disturbing bodily symptoms, in dreams. They turn away from national myths, from the past and future alike, whispering songs in our ears, guiding the way, unsettling the mind, dying, living beside us. At times, they did not respond to our calls, and so we were left alone with the ethical question of inviting them to the exhibition and with the unresolvable desire for perfect repair. As our weekly meetings progressed, the spirits we had summoned began to take form in matter that materialized in their image, opening its mouth to speak in the language of the artists.

The exhibition joins a short international history of exhibitions inspired by the spectral turn, which began with Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993). In this book, Derrida coined the term hauntology – a play on the word ontology: Instead of asking “what is,” Derrida suggested that the present is always haunted by what has been repressed or promised in the past and never fulfilled in the future. The question “what haunts you?”, together with its inseparable counterpart “what haunts us?” situated us within this geopolitical space. We felt in our bodies, as Hamlet said, how “the time is out of joint,” and through reading the texts of thinkers who wrote our own unresolved ghosts of the past, we sought to weave our past-present-future here in a different way, and to expand the range of our action and resistance. The texts are offered as a reading list for visitors to the exhibition.

Our modes of action and thought within the exhibition unfolded organically from our encounters; they were not aimed at capturing a spirit, naming it, or analyzing it and its manifestation in art, but rather at opening up to the ghosts’ pursuit of our emotional and conceptual structures. And yours. The fringes of the exhibition will remain frayed, allowing the dead, the spirits, and that which has not yet been named to continue haunting us.

The sculptural installation Kryptē #9 opens the exhibition. It is an MDF construction that artist Maia Duniec assembled over the opening of the water fountain. Embedded within the structure are nine white clay sculptures containing soil collected from nine cemeteries and gold teeth.

At the center of Laila Abd Elrazaq’s installation Till Death Do Us Part stands a thermal printer that alternately ejects the phrases “Death to the Jews” / “Death to the Arabs” in an unending stream. A voice, distorted into a robotic tone, accompanies the printer, repeating: “Go back to where you came from.” By translating hate speech into a perpetual mechanical loop, the work exposes the bureaucratic machine of dehumanization.

At the center of the space, Michaela Winefield Fleishman placed a lithographic stone originating from Bavaria, onto which she has etched a processed photograph of Adolf Eichmann, seen from behind as he showers. On the reverse side of the stone, she etched the opening line of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

In her work Basma, Aisha Kadry painted in oils her great-grandmother singing in the fields at the foot of the Galilee mountains to a convoy of nomads descending from the mountain, who pause to listen to her voice. She and they appear as hybrid figures, combining human, skull, and animal.

Malak Manzour presents I Stretched Out of You, Saturated Outcast Skin Immersed in Bubblegum Air: a sculpture of a deer made of foil and wax, split open and spread at the center, beside a wall object composed of layered drawings resembling a root.

In the installation I’ll Let the Birds Peck My Heart, Omer Peri combines a sculptural infrastructure made of remnants of wooden furniture with rice paper drawing.

In the performance Tem Fim, artist and choreographer Gal Levinson, together with another dancer, spin at a steady pace on a small plastic disc in a continuous loop. Around the space stretches a line of snapshots that capture the body in the split second before a scream bursts from it. The performance, to be presented on the opening night of the exhibition, will leave physical traces in the exhibition space.

Recorder Sail consists of two sculptures by Din Bar that mimic wind sails, made from toilet paper pulp, cotton threads, bits of wood, and a recorder.

Raghad Sawaed revisits a military funeral held in her village through a play of whites in the painting A Soldier Dreaming of White Roses, and through sculptural objects of mobile tombstones topped with lifebuoys.