An excerpt from Fair-stressed Demeter by Drorit Gur-Arie

Bread - a word that inhabits a basic existence, a metonymy for hunger as well as satiation; Bread and Circuses - the Emperor's bribe to the masses in ancient Rome; in western hedonistic society, where culture and gastronomy habitually flirt with each other, industrial bread is upgraded with mixtures that improve its taste infinitely and it spreads its aroma in prestigious pastry shops, a spectacle of inspiration and grace; at the same time, it is displayed on the news as the sign of an intense social struggle in the Jerusalem "Bread Plaza" in front of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset; in Judaism, bread's power is strengthened by dipping it in salt before saying Hamotsi (the blessing over bread), and in former times bread and salt were presented as a peace offering to all those who came through the Jerusalem gates; and yet, it is no coincidence that in Hebrew the same letters form the words bread (lechem), salt (melach) and war (milchama).

In her works, Raff favors the implicit over the explicit, and her images intensify a past that seeks clarification. Like an act of detection, the artist follows with her camera traces and signs of a place or a time, findings by means of which she wishes to breath life into a frozen memory and construct a narrative from vague fragments, left behind as a present absence: the markings of furniture in an abandoned house, signs engraved on school desks or ice accumulations in an empty household refrigerator. Now the evidence line-up is augmented by dough crumbs that cling to walls and charred baking trays, extinguished ovens and rows of stainless-steel trays on which dough lumps covered in batter are stretched out, looking like rotting corpses.

The proximity of the terrifying and morbid to the spectacular and enchanting is also evident in some of Raff's works. There is an unresolved tension in her photographs between potential vitality and beauty, and nullifying restraint. The radicalization that is fundamental to Raff's photographic staging neutralizes the vitality implied by the image of turning live dough into bread, converting it into a clinical presence. The glowing fire that breaths life into dough as in an act of creation is stamped onto the singed limbs of Raff's floury "death victims" like a decisive seal.

Like the photographs, the video A Roundabout (Fertility/Futility) (2004), depicting a female figure in the midst of a strange bread ritual, also puts bread back in its mythical cultural contexts, where it is associated with ritual acts. Associations of fecundity, conception and birth, impurity and lust, death and resurrection flow into the bread-stomach kneaded by the woman, who is dressed in white like a priestess.

The woman in Raff's video, shaman-like, frantically strives to bring a stale loaf of bread back to life. Her hands tear the bread's flesh, ravenously digging into its guts, Beuys-like, Sisyphically trying to restore the shriveled bread crust, to heal its dry skin with sandpaper, but the bread crumbles in her exertion-reddened hands. The ruptured fruit of the womb is dispersed, and the agonizing process starts all over again. Raff explores the affinity between instinct and necessity, between sexuality and urge, and in her present video her ongoing preoccupation with femininity, obsession and compulsion presents itself with archaic urgency: the manic bursts accelerate and seem to seek fulfillment of a physical hunger, a sexual hunger, an insatiable

Project Room : Mona Oren

16.04.05 - 20.05.05

The Kissing Room