Three new exhibitions with the title THREADS
Nava Harel-Shoshani – HEROINES WITHOUT CROWNS curated by Rina Gnosov
Maria Arendt – INSIDE OUT curated by Naomi Gordon-Chen
Revital Arbel – DEFLORATION curated by Ray Sommer-Tal
Revital Arbel is an artist as well as a gynecologist. As an artist she works primarily by combining photography and embroidery. As a doctor she specializes in gender reassignment surgery (sex change operations), surgery to restore virginity and pelvic floor recovery following childbirth – sensitive issues that inundate her artistic creations as well.
In the exhibition, adapted to the library space, the artist displays “Tapestries” that were created by hand embossed medical seals once used to signify the location of pathological findings and by embroidery on photographs taken by the artist. The series of photographs also depicts processes and images from the world of medicine: a placenta, a fetus in the womb, and a belly showing a surgical scar concealed by a tattoo. These photographs are difficult to view, and the artist has used embroidery to embellish them by adding capillaries, emphasizing internal organs, and attempting to intervene in medical procedures. An exception can be seen in the work Defloration, at the center of which are flowers photographed by the artist during a family trip to Portugal. Nevertheless, the word “defloration” usually refers to the act of depriving a woman of her virginity by rupturing the hymen through sexual intercourse. A close look reveals that the pastoral photographs of flowers is actually a collage in which some of the flowers are actually photographs of hymens that have been surgically restored. Embroidered flowers are interspersed with the bare embroidered hymens.
Revital Arbel has also built a special installation for the library space. In which she uses sterile sheet and gown from the operating room and attaches embroidered photographs to them. The installation represents an artistic atempt to introduce the spirit of the operating room into the library museum space.
As a surgeon, Revital Arbel specializes in fusing, repairing and healing human ruptures. As an artist she has chosen to continue using needle and thread to generate intervention and repair.
Raya Zommer-Tal
Exhibition Curator
