Wound

Many literary and artistic works dealing with death, especially death in the battlefield, perpetuate the figure of the living-dead as a ghost, a shadow that haunts the living, demanding that they cherish the memory of its victim. The exhibition “Wound” addresses the essentially abstract experience of pain, primarily the pain involved in the loss of a loved one, which fundamentally cannot be healed. A ghost is also a phantom, calling to mind phantom pain—a medical phenomenon relating to pain felt by an individual who lost a limb where the missing limb had been, as if it were still there. By the same token, the pain of the living for loss of their dear ones engulfs them like a non-expellable ghost.
Interestingly, the word “trauma” originates from the Greek, where it denotes a wound. One of the behavioral symptoms of a traumatized person is re-experiencing the traumatizing event. Painful and often unbearable, this repetition often sets destructive mechanisms of confrontation in motion which, rather than healing the body or soul, sustain the destruction brought about by trauma.
In the works featured in the current exhibition, the phantom of trauma breathes life into inanimate objects and abstract representations, lending them obsessive, even haunting qualities. It is precisely the concentration on the inanimate that shows wound and pain to be the fate of the living, and the living alone.
Participating artists: Ruth Barabash, Peleg Dishon, Jacob El-Hanani, Dana Levy, Oz Malul, Khen Shish
Curators: Drorit Gur-Arie, Hila Cohen-Schneiderman, Sigal Kehat-Krinski