Beita Gallery

Opening Event:

Address: Jaffa St. 155

Monday 11.03.2024 at 18:00

Closing Date: Tuesday 30.04.2024 (time will be announced)

A Boomerang on Breath-Routes

Curator: Shira Friedman

Artist: Shy Abady

In A Boomerang on Breath-Routes, titled after the opening line of Paul Celan’s poem, Shy Abady revisits personalities, landscapes, and objects that he has engaged with in the past, presented here as witnesses to what is happening in Israel during Autumn 2023. 

Alongside images of famous philosophers and literary giants Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, and Yaakov Shabtai, whose life stories were complex and tragic, are  depicted the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, the tomb of a Sheikh/Tzaddik, a water tower, and Washingtonia Robusta and Cypress trees, all highly symbolic to this narrative of impending catastrophe.

The immense contribution of these figures to literature and ethics is invoked here as a kind of ominous warning; all of them have given voice to the fragility of human institutions and collective memory, issuing a moral exhortation to grapple with the past. Abady and his heroes are not calm: they remind us, as in Celan’s poem, to “stand still for a heartbeat once in a thousand years,” as catastrophe, unexamined, always returns, “as a boomerang.”

The works are drawn and burned on OSB panels, and are characterized by a bright background and a red line that seems to be continuous and connecting  between them. It is interesting to think about Abady’s charred, burnt, and beautiful works in context of what Benjamin wrote in his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," where he warns against the inclination to see disasters as purely aesthetic events, disconnected from their political and ethical echoes—a possibility that threatens to dull our consciousness to the real horrors that were part of these events.