BDE (Ongoing)

Balagan is a Yiddish word with its roots in the Persian language; it is now used by both Arabic and Hebrew speakers. It means chaos, mess, disorder. 

The series was conceived of as a forest: a landscape made of female bodies that ambiguously hover between states of disappearance and appearance. In so many children’s fairytales the forest is used as a symbol of the other-than-human world. A place filled with magical creatures, or where dark and wild forces are at play. An uncanny place of both vulnerability and transformation. This series is structured by the number seven: seven panels each seven feet tall suspended from the ceiling,  floating a few inches from the ground. In the Torah the number seven holds special significance; it is a sacred space and time when the world becomes whole. The world is described as created in seven days. There are seven names for heaven and the earth. Seven days of the week; the seventh day being a day of rest (shabbat). And the seventh year, the shmita year, is when the land is returned to a commons and rests; marking a time when debts are forgiven.

The Stop Right There series uses the language of portraiture to create a double moment of ethical subjectivity. In effect, the face of the Other is used as mediation device, one that negotiates the encounter between a painted and a viewing subject. This double moment of subjectivity prompts the question of whether it is the gaze of the painted subject who suspends the viewer in time, or whether it is the viewer’s look that momentarily captures the gaze of the painted subject? The portraits are not general or arbitrary figures, they are gender-specific, who despite their individual situation of despair, panic, or worry, gain a sense of collective strength as they stand in solidarity with each other. Employing the structure of an ethical moment of the face-to-face, as philosopher Emmanuel Levinas articulated it, A.Z captures the challenge gender-based violence presents humanity. 

Drawing on the history of sketching as a deeply personal medium and one that often functions as a reference point for painting, the portraits that make up Femme-Animalia collectively read as an illustrated diary. Each image pairs a female with her other-than-human companion, configuring subjectivity as a queer relation that slips and slides amidst the artificial human-animal divide. Depicting a multifaceted series of intimate female and other-than-human animal attachments, each portrait illuminates a unique transpecies bond of care, empathy, companionship, reciprocity, and affection. These inherently collective subjects problematize ideas of human individualism and exceptionalism.