Our Father, group exhibition, Zuzu Art Gallery, Emek Hefer

Curators: the late Ruty Chinsky-Amitay and Rotem Ritov

Participants:
Odelia Elhanani, Orit Akta, Orit Bertini Shavit, Nurit Gur Lavy,
Shiraz Grinbaum, Li Chen, Tigist Yoseph Ron, Nurit Yarden,
Chen Cohen, Anat Michaelis Levi, Belle Shafir
 

The exhibition Our Father is a tribute to Ruty Chinsky-Amitay, who was taken from this world tragically in January 2024, when she was at the pinnacle of her research at the Cité art residency in Paris. Ruty worked on this tender and delicate exhibition, which deals with relationships between fathers and daughters, throughout the last year of her life. After her death, Ruty’s life partner Ofer entrusted me with the list of artists and artworks Ruty had selected some time before, as well as her notes, which included references to articles and psychoanalytical sources which discuss the relationships between daughters and fathers and the appearance of these familial relationships in mythology. Ruty’s curatorial craft was cut short horrifically. In the notes provided to me, Ruty jotted down a single line containing several guiding questions that hint at her curatorial intentions: “To what extent did the relationships between daughters and fathers influence and dictate their art? In what way? What was overt and what was covert? What was the definitive moment? Sometimes these are things that become clear at a later stage.” What were Ruty’s thoughts and where did she plan to point the thematic spotlight? I will never know for sure. My conversations with the artists revealed a variety of father-daughter relationships. What they all had in common were similar characteristics of paternal presence/absence in their lives, as well as their context within worldwide societal and cultural conceptions.
Thus, I embarked on a journey of study led by the question: What is fatherhood?......................
 
……………Nurit Yarden, Black & White, 2010, photography
 
For many years, Nurit Yarden dealt with material from her family album, seeking to examine what the photographs in it revealed and what they were hiding. This exhibition presents three works created from her family slide collection, which her father, an amateur photographer, photographed during her childhood when her family was in Paris. Each of the works presents a double photograph in the format of a diptych. Different contradictory headings appear below each identical pair of pictures. One depicts a happy state, a moment of joy, as we tend to approach the family album. The second heading reflects the true reality as it was at the time of the photograph. Thus, Nurit adds a layer of meaning to help decipher the story hiding within them and dictates how the viewer interprets the photographs. The acts of enlarging the photographs, reprinting them and adding texts, reveal the rifts in the familial relationship and the gap between reality and the outward appearance the photographs create. For Nurit, this is a way to examine and decipher the family album as a representation of the ultimate fantasy of happiness.