Art

On the Everyman cinema stage in London (2009), Shuli Nachshon wrapped herself with a dramatic colourful kerchief that was lit with tiny light bulbs. The gentle warm light presents viewers with a human sculpture that very soon unveils the artist and metaphorically exposes her voice.

The big kerchief enveloping Nachshon acts as a temporary domestic space. This is part of Nachshon’s wider interest in derelict residential urban spaces and their potential as creative hubs for the production of her art.

Nachshon sings an iconic Jewish (religious) song, A Woman of Worth that involves a husband praising his wife. Following her singing, Nachshon makes a short statement, ‘I stand here in your place. My voice is your unheard voice’, casting doubt about the song’s nature, implying its hidden chauvinism to contemporary and secular eyes… In so doing, Nachshon gives a voice to past generations of women in her family.

The artist’s repetition of this statement in three languages, Hebrew, Arabic and English, reveals familial, cultural and socio-political tensions, barriers, boundaries and complexities.

Galit Mana
Curator & Art Critic based in London

Talit?
White fabric, congregation, clothing, cultural inheritance, purity, prayers, sacred, spiritual, ritual, smooth, soft, synagogue, blessing, gender, Jewish males, worship of God.

Transforming Talit
Nachshon’s inherited talit with its symmetric, geometric layout is an impurified** ready-made object that marks the boundaries of a miniature, artificial field for growing wheat seeds. This wheat field, symbolically and controversially shifts between Jewish religious and secular life, embracing a new identity and objective.

Acting with Talit
Through Nachshon’s bold act of laying the talit on the ground and assimilating it with earth and soil, she references issues relating to hunger and globalisation, Jewish biblical stories in a similar context, Jewish burial customs, death and sacrilege of the talit (a sacred object) as well as appropriating the talit in an agricultural context – bedding for growing wheat. The talit with the growing wheat seeds becomes a symbol of an alternative means of basic food production, a utopian solution – a mobile wheat field – for tackling hunger and lack of food globally. This miniature green field represents the beginning of a new life for a metaphorically activist talit. 

*A talit is a ceremonial prayer shawl.

**In an orthodox Jewish context, Nachshon’s act of laying a talit on the ground and covering it with soil and wheat seeds, is considered sacrilege.

Galit Mana
Art Critic & Curator