Noa Tavori: Thirst

Curator: Smadar Schindler

 

At the center of Noa Tavori’s exhibition Thirst is a collection of head sculptures, made from a mixture of soil materials. Untethered, left to their own devices: planted in a time with no memory, either fallen to the ground or sprouted from it. Beside these heads, the installation references a sabil (سَبِيل)—a public drinking fountain of the sort found at road junctions and other spots where thirsty passersby used to stop. In Arabic, the word sabil means road. In Muslim culture, it was customary for a person who had experienced a miracle to give thanks by rigging up a water tap by the wayside, for public use, in arid places where drinking water was not readily available.

The exhibition associates between the human intimacy and sense of community of the cluster of head and the sabil that serves as a meeting and gathering place, and engages with giving back to society and social connection. There is an intricate connection between the heads made of dried soil and the sabil water—one between two materials and two states of matter: the immense and invisible power stored in Mother Earth in conditions of thirst, aridity, dryness, and wilting, versus running water that gives life and growth but can also mean destruction and annihilation if it engulfs and carries away the coterie of heads or dissolves the soil they are made of.

Tavori’s exhibition proffers a complex relationship between sculpture and site-specific installation, thereby creating a new environment. The artist’s material of choice is a crucial starting point for her examination of the possibilities of expressing ecological concepts in sculpture. Tavori is a graduate of the Department of Ceramic Design at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. During the COVID-19 pandemic she, along with a multidisciplinary group of artists, developed an educational model based on combining art with education and ecology. Mindful of the ecological footprint involved and in an effort to focus on working with natural, readily biodegradable materials, she began working with a combination of soils that can be sculpted without the need for firing in a kiln.

The heads on display were formed in reusable molds of faces that were made from the face of the artist herself and the faces of people close to her or in her immediate circles. The physical similarity between the sculptures (all featuring shut eyes), coupled with the differences between them, aspires to forge an association—a tête-à-tête (head to head, face to face)—of closeness and emotional connection between visitors and sculptures, and to foster an imaginary dialogue between the living and the inanimate. Tavori’s artistic endeavor engages with the links between a living human body and an inanimate sculptural presence, and the fine line between them. This presence lies at the heart of most of her recent exhibitions, which featured works that were part-imaginary and partly based on existing figures in contemporary culture or on classical sculptures of mythological figures.

Heads are one of the mainstays of sculpture. The exhibition presents a common thread with the ritual tradition of antiquity—whereby whole sets of terracotta figurines were offered to the gods as sacrificial offerings—as implicit in archetypal visual elements referencing ancient civilizations: the serial nature of the heads and the differences between them; the cracked soil; the positioning of the sculptures in the space and their placement on the floor; and the textured marking of the bottom sections of the surrounding walls as though revealing cross-sections of archaeological layers, which may also recall the ornamental marble patterns in Greek and Roman temples and architecture. In modern art, busts and head sculptures feature in the works of a group of artists influenced by the realism of early twentieth-century French sculptors (such as Auguste Rodin, and others) and, later, in the works of certain pre-independence Israeli artists. The latter include the busts produced by Zeev Ben-Zvi, who used Cubism to enhance the monumentality of his pieces; the works of Batia Lishansky, who endowed her sculptures with expressiveness while being faithful to the material and highlighting its spiritual essence; and Chana Orloff, a Parisian sculptor whose work on the themes of motherhood, inter-generational relationships, and the link between a living body and an inanimate sculpture influenced Tavori and finds expression in her work.

Despite their heavy and massive appearance, Tavori’s sculptures preserve both the shape and softness of the face and the material’s integrity. At times, she seems to work like a production worker in a bust factory: some are refined, almost flawless, and some feature strange appendages or look as though they are not fully formed. Each of the sculptures preserves the form of a human head that is not fully polished—is not “final.” In some instances, the head looks thin and brittle; in others, like a solid structure. The human face in the sculptures embodies primacy and diversity as essential human attributes: a tousled head, a layered head, a head of inscrutable thoughts.

The sculptures in the exhibition represent a collection of figures akin to random passersby: each hailing from somewhere else or headed in a different direction, and all mutely recounting their respective experiences. The mouths of the heads are full of dirt, their nostrils are clogged, their eyes are shut, and they are earless. They want to blink or gape, but the weight of the dense material strikes them dumb. Their language is their materiality. Their character becomes apparent and accentuated in the contours of their form, and in the artist’s interventions in it. The collection of heads is one of variations duplicated by deviations from the original. Each deviation is like a stage in the evolution of the bust organism. In some the change is subtle; in others, profound.

The preoccupation with the links, the closeness and the similarities between the figures that the heads are based upon—mother and daughters, biological or spiritual siblings—is another installment in Tavori’s musings on local dynasties and connections to the Israeli locale and the times. The selection of men and women who enter the artist’s pantheon of heads is based on great closeness, which is why the faces also appear to deliberately turn their gaze to each other. Is this an attempt to establish eye contact with one another, despite the eyes being shut? In any event, the directions of their gazes produce a kind of human dynamic and evoke a sense of convergence, of assembly or a tribe.

The positioning of the works on the floor of the exhibition space and the contact between bust and floor—material touching material—enable Tavori to underscore her preoccupation with reflections of self and of inter-generational replications. The exhibition space is the “body” that bears the heads and gives them a counteracting and expanding platform that opens the door to additional worlds.

In this broken time, where past, present, and future change like an organism, shifting shapes, the exhibition space offers a respite that allows reflection, longing, and thirst for something new, different. The heads—both individually, as discrete entities, and as an assembly or a community-in-waiting—appear to be resting in a state of slumber, still and withdrawn. They are like pre-germination seeds waiting for the moisture of water droplets, be it from the sabil or from the first rains and the intoxicating smell of the petrichor—the smell of the earth after the first rain; the very essence of life. Meanwhile, waiting for their hatching, the heads exist in a state of containment and potentiality, each drawing strength from its surrounding duplicates, from their silence and the magnetic induction between them. Contactless contact...