Farewell Summer House

November 2022

Artists Hila Laviv, Shir Lusky and Yael Efrati

These sculptural works created especially for the exhibition 'Farewell Summer House'. Based on photographic sources and drawing on photographic sensibilities, these works engage with childhood memories tied to the homes of the artists’ grandparents. New interpretations arise from exploring the gap between recalling these childhood experiences, which can be elusive and ambiguous, and fixing them in a single photographic moment in time. The personal memories tie in with a broad range of historical and cultural contexts.

Hila Laviv (b. 1975, Ramat Gan) presents a collection of photographic collages based on a farewell album of her grandmother’s family from their summer house in Kösterberg, Hamburg. In the stop-motion work Paper and Scissors, a woman’s voice guides the viewers while pages of the album are cut in time with her speech. An image is projected onto a hanging piece of paper: a cutout of a white rocking chair that used to be at the summer house. Laviv’s grandmother, Noni Warburg, was born into the German Warburg family and the Swedish Josephson family. Noni’s mother, Anna Warburg, was a groundbreaking educator who studied under Friedrich Froebel, inventor of the modern-day kindergarten. Noni’s uncle, Aby Warburg, was a renowned art historian. The extraordinary division of the album by subject – The View, Ways, Interiors, The Sandbox, etc. – is similar to Aby Warburg’s sorting and cataloguing technique.

The artist writes about first learning of her legacy and of the album:

My grandmother used to cut up books and photographs in order to make new books out of them for our birthdays, weaving memories and fantasies into them. I would be leafing through a book in some unknown language and suddenly find a hole where a picture had been. I liked the holes. It was a magical experience. When the album came into my possession, it was falling to bits itself and some of the photos were missing. It contains longing and questions about what it means to have an identity, a homeland, and to lose one’s home. The ceremonial act of cutting out is an attempt to explore something through disassembling and reassembling, and through engaging in a physical relationship with the memory object. I have memories from places I’ve never visited, handed down to me through my grandmother and the objects in her house. This transformative experience has led me to engage artistically with the material, since I believe that surgically examining the objects will ultimately reveal the cipher that can open up the portal to the past, enabling me to decipher it. There is a wish for a collaboration, supposedly impossible, between past and present – to both continue the story and change it at the same time.

Shir Lusky (b. 1988, Herzliya) presents two trapeze sculptures made of iron and wood that appear to be frozen in motion, as well as a copy of a late 1930s photograph of her grandfather, Zeev Kroz, taken from a family album. The young boy is seen spreading his arms in a sort of inverted cross, and it is not clear whether he is controlling their weight or letting them hang down. On the back is the name of the photographer: K. Bremer, and the place: Pinsker Street, Tel Aviv. The year is approximately 1937-1940. The artist writes about the sculpture she created after finding the photo:

A trapeze is an apparatus that acrobats use. In a ‘flying trapeze’, the acrobats leap through the air with one playing catcher and the other playing flyer. The trapeze represents a kind of limbo, caught between heaven and earth, and always involves physical risk. In the gallery, two trapezes hang from the ceiling as though frozen in mid-air, just after the flyers let go. This moment frees the trapeze from the gravity of the person hanging off it, leaving it in the momentum of letting go.

Yael Efrati (b. 1978, Petah Tikva) creates objects based on a simple, direct photograph from which she cuts out and recreates details representing a particular time and place. All the parameters that affect the photo – light and shade, perspective, the borders of the frame – are translated into a meticulous sculptural form. Efrati’s works capture episodes, spatial situations and various points of view, moving between describing a personal memory – often from her grandmother’s house in Haifa – and capturing the ongoing experience of a place. The work exhibited here recreates window bars. The bars are sculpted out of clay and covered with graphite powder. On either side of them are palm prints: a negative image of hands that held them and hung on to them, a corporeal memory. Unlike a photo, where the details are usually different in scale from the actual objects, Efrati makes a point of maintaining a 1:1 scale in her sculptures. The bars in the exhibition are a fragment, isolated from their natural surroundings. They can be viewed as an element of a place that conveys the values and mood of a particular environment.