Under The Sign Of Saturn |
Curator : Shir Meller Yamaguchi | Kibbutz Hazorea
Israel Willfrid Museum | January 19-Augoust 17 2024
In Hanita Ilan’s work, painting and erasing act as a conceptual and aesthetic conduit, by which she point to the transience of utopias and ideologies that collapsed in the face of the tumultuous reality. This was the backdrop for her painting installation, created for the space that served as Kibbutz Hazorea readin room in the 1950s.
In the ancient wood cabinets designed by Munio Weinraub, now empty of the books they once held, Ilan recognized echoes of the dissolution of the socialist ideas on which the kibbutz was founded. In one of them she placed a painting of a donkey standing alone in the darkness, perhaps alluding to the Messiah who has not yet come.
Upon entering the installation, the viewer finds himself face to face with rows of studying and prayer stenders covered with a large scale painted scroll.
This is a fraught object – an historical vestige from Midrashiyat Noam in Pardes Hanna, an educational establishment that was once considered the crowning jewel of the religious Zionism movement, and was shut down in the wake of a moral breakdown. Blank books are scattered around the rocky landscape, the spiritual content they once held now lost, or perhaps still waiting to b written.
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Wet Torah scrolls are spread out to dry on the abandoned stenders, in an attempt to save the texts. Alongside them, the image of a man sleeping on an upside-down bench, engraved books laid o his heart, brings to mind Jacob’s Dream – except that the dreaming man is not accompanied by a ladder, but rather surrounded by overturned benches floating around the pictorial space.
Ilan often works with photographic source material, which this time included archival photos of Kibbutz Hazorea and Midrashiyat Noam. Although the images’ source is documentary, the process of subtracting, spreading, spilling, andwiping pushes them towards abstraction.
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Ilan’s practice is deeply connected to a complex relationship with faith and the religion on which sh was raised. The tension between the disintegrating and the unifying power of painting already drew Ilan in her previous exhibitions, and her decision to return to the long medium of a scroll, either completel unfurled or partially rolled, allows her to shift between revelation and concealment, intimation and secret. Ilan’s scroll cascades from above like a promise of a message, drapes on and between the
stenders and spreads to the floor, as though inviting us to step into an imaginary world. The view tha slowly unfolds before us reveals traces of images, like remnants salvaged from a catastrophe that continue to disintegrate into oblivion, dissolving into the layers of paint.
The painting take shape through material dissolution, within which she builds layers upon layers, creating an amalgamation of times and fragments of reality.
The monochromatic choice of purplish brown hues gives the scroll a melancholic air, which ties in with the exhibition’s title Under the Sign of Saturn. This sign, which is known to inspire one’s soul to philosophy and prophecy, is also associated with the Jews and their fate, and is even attributed the delay in the coming of the Messiah.
But for Ilan, salvation is embodied in the act of painting itself; the abstraction in her paintings frees the images and the vestiges of the past from their material and conceptual mass, and they dissolve into an infinite flow. The donkey at the top of the scroll no longer alleges to carry any true or false prophets; it stops and returns the viewer’s gaze, as though wondering where the path may lead…
Shir Meller-Yamaguchi
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