The body to suggest the unspeakable. Judith Lenglart’s exhibition "With Blind Steps," in Jerusalem, is based on the first part of her doctoral thesis conducted jointly at the University of Jerusalem and EHESS in Paris. Her thesis focuses on the representation of Holocaust trauma in video art in Israel from the 1970s to the present day. The exhibition offers a deep reflection on the birth of performance art, the use of the body in visual art, the dehumanization and repair of the body, as well as the subtle link between past and present. The tension between destruction and reconstruction, symbolic death and breath of life, is particularly striking. The question of memory is addressed brilliantly, relying on the ambivalence between life and death, as well as between violence and benevolence. Judith has achieved the remarkable feat of conveying Holocaust memory without ever showing an image of a camp or a Holocaust survivor. With great finesse, references, and subliminal messages, she invites visitors to reconsider the past through the experience of the body and leaves ample place for personal interpretation.
"The subject is uncommon because it combines questions of memory with video art, which is rarely associated with historical reflection but more often with current events. Video has often been defined as the medium of post-modernism, which responds to the present and pays little attention to the past, and even less to memory," Judith Lenglart tells Itonnews.
Approaching the Holocaust differently
Nestled in the basement of Mamuta, an independent art research center, the exhibition is set up in this unique space that perfectly suits its theme. Like memory, the space is buried, secret, denied, and suited for viewing videos. In this meticulously utilized space, Judith has arranged the photographic and video works of selected artists so that they either resonate with or oppose each other, depending on their visual impact and meaning.
"The exhibition indicates the meaning of the past and reminds us that as individuals, we must create our own relationship with the past, questioning the humanization or objectification of the body. I aim to show that the least explicit images express the trauma's violence more profoundly," Judith asserts. "I want to prove that video, which has very few rules of narration, allows for the expression of memory experience, as it can create disjunctions and overlays of images. Memory is never delivered as an object; the relationship to the past is an individual and fragile practice that is constantly evolving," Judith Lenglart explains.
The exhibition pays tribute to Leib Rochman’s book "With Blind Steps," written in Yiddish and translated into Hebrew and French. This text, which describes a Holocaust survivor’s wandering with a predominance of hallucination, was Judith’s starting point. "Trauma is a certain form of hallucination in the sense that it always positions itself between reality and oneself as something elusive with no end," Judith states.
In the works, which are both incantations, poems, and hallucinations, remembrance is both an action and a state of mind: it is primarily about following incomplete and constantly changing images. In these performances, artists use the body as a tool to reconstruct or relive what seemed invisible or lost. It is a confrontation between images that attempt to be updated and the present, which always affects the questions of oneself and others in memory.
Contrasting Life and Death
In one video, intertwined bodies representing the sexual liberation of the 1970s echo the stacked bodies in the camps during the Holocaust. Video art here serves as a visual language of memory and consciousness.
In Avraham Eilat’s video, which visitors can view from one room to another, the artist does not directly address Holocaust memory but focuses on body movement and aesthetic questions. The character, whose face is concealed, runs through a forest. "I linked this to the Holocaust because it is a form of reactivation of a historical scene, that of the little boy in the Warsaw ghetto. Here, anonymization represents flight, clandestine immigration, identity wandering, and metamorphosis," Judith explains.
Next to this, viewers discover David Perlov’s documentary, which explores the construction of Holocaust memory in Israel through the planting of trees (one of the first ways to remember the Holocaust, with 6 million trees planted for 6 million victims). The video echoes Avraham Eilat’s forest, with barbed wire symbolizing the camps and death. Here, the forest with plantings symbolizes hope and life and provides an alternative landscape to the desert.
The exhibition also features photographs and animated images, blending various genres such as experimental cinema and animated film. Yoram and Alina Gross’s first stop-motion animation film is dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jews killed, using numerous symbols: candles, broken glasses, and stripes that recall the striped pajamas of the deportees.
The ambivalence between destruction and repair
Artist Gideon Gechtman addressed the mortal condition of man through illness and mourning by creating an autobiographical work in 1979. It notably shows the shaving of a body before a surgical procedure, symbolizing dehumanization, control over another’s body, and directly referencing the shaving of prisoners in camps. Judith connects this to individual and collective memory.
To repair the wounded body, Yocheved Weinfeld photographed a series of "stitched" hands. Coming from a family of Holocaust survivors, Yocheved photographed her hands, printed the images, and sewed over them before photographing them again. Her work is an imaginative expression of pain—a pain inflicted upon oneself, a form of catharsis.
"The hand represents humanity; it has a universal dimension. It is also the first contact we have, and our fate is written in the lines of the hand. Her work, which plays on the ambiguity between sacrifice and repair, refers to the practice of remembrance," Judith explains.
The vulnerability of the body
The body, the central focus of the exhibition, appears in its most vulnerable form: nudity. Haim Maor took his photographs in 1975. The artist, whose parents are Holocaust survivors, contrasts the organic lines of the body with geometric lines in black and white, then brings them together. He depicts the naked body, turned into an object, where the subjects have their hands tied and are in a position of weakness.
In his video work, he highlights the limits of the body when it is disabled. Created around his grandfather, who lost his sight after being abused by a Nazi soldier, the artist tried to reconstruct his blind grandfather’s perception through touch. The hand here evokes a reflection on memory as the ability to see the past and as an impediment to seeing the present because it is too immediate—the memory as a blindness.
An exhibition that is both moving and thought-provoking, challenging our own perception of the memory of a collective event. Until September 26, 14 Guedaliau Alon Street, Jerusalem, Tuesday to Thursday from 1 PM to 6 PM, and Friday from 10 AM to 2 PM.
Caroline Haïat
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