Wilfrid Israel Museum

Group Exhibition by: Ayelet Zohar, Asnat Austerlitz, Batia Shani, Dina Shenhav, Dalit Proter, Vik Jacobson Frid, Michal Shachnai Yacobi, Meshy Koplevitch, Ronit Agassi.

The exhibition “Loaded Silence”, which opens simultaneously with Vietnamese artist Khan Bui Cong’s exhibition, “Seam Line”, presents Israeli women artists who are dealing with the constant presence of tension in the shadow of an ongoing conflicted reality: the militaristic culture in which we live, the wars of the past that continue to hurt, and the threat of the wars still to come. The art works deal with the subtle nuances of preserving the social cover in the shadow of tension and conflict, as perceived in the feminine experience.

The presence of women’s organizations opposing the use of violence and military force in conflict resolution has been prominent for many years in the public sphere. It can be said that the female voice is constantly taking on the social role, defying and alerting the state of mind of society, a society so saturated with tension and violence that is repressed and yet it is bubbling from underneath the surface. Our “national resilience,” which we have learned to externally express as a society, has gradually become an extra thick skin that allows us survival in danger, but has also become the numbness, loss of sensitivity and roughness, that is so identified with Israeliness.
Israeli art has been dealing with the soldier’s image in recent decades, challenging issues such as male heroism, militaristic ethos and exposing troubling questions.

The exhibition is divided into two clusters – the first is characterized by meticulous aesthetics, which isolates the military images from events that are distinguished in time and place. The distant perspective creates a sense of simultaneity and enables us to detach ourselves from the complex emotional and mental baggage we are trapped in, regarding the political reality. The works are restrained, and yet a quiet cry emerges from them, about the violence that has become an existential state of consciousness.

The second group of works penetrates a painful and ambivalent emotional space – the moment when our children become soldiers. At what point is that moment, when they shut down their feelings, and can aim the weapon at anyone who has been targeted as “The Enemy”? The works carry a taste of absurdity and move between the world of imagination and play and the sad reality, in which the draft infiltrates from early childhood into children’s games, causing an early maturation. These are autobiographical works that relate to childhood and youth from a personal point of view, in a country where the binding of Isaac is a founding myth.