Performance No. 1 of the trilogy “Birds' life”
“Return” 2008-2024
Duration 1 hour 15 minutes
As part of the personal exhibition “Bird on the Windowsill” Beit Liebling, TA
Curators Shira Benyemini and Anat Levy
This is my old performance, which premiered in the immemorial year 2008 at the ART-Strelka gallery under the curatorship of Olya Lopukhova Hall. I’m 35. Literally a year before, I moved from Israel to Moscow. And although I have been living independently since I was 17, this is the first time I have left my parents so far and for so long. It was an amazing experience of re-emigration, re-repatriation. Therefore, then this performance was, rather, about returning to my native-non-native language, to a parallel future, about returning to myself, at least to the kind of myself that I wanted to be.
And now, 16 years later, I am showing this performance in Israel. I’m 50. My dad is no longer here. I had been back a year and a half before. Again re-emigration, re-repatriation. Again a return to the native-non-native language. But this time it’s already a return to the past, to myself, from whom I once left.
But this is all just emotional, biographical and geopolitical context. I am not sure that then and now it had a direct connection, although, of course, it was precisely these circumstances that led me to create this work.
But the viewer sees only a set table, a video projection on which two elderly people eat in silence, and their middle-aged, overweight, bald son, who eats alone along with video shadows of his parents.
Photo: Yael Schmidt
Video: Shifra Kazhdan
