Lipitor
Tova Pesah
Curator: Danielle Tzadka Cohen
Tova Pesach's exhibition, Lipitor, explores the complex and intimate relationship between cats and humans, particularly through the artist's daily encounters with the cats of the Park Hayovel neighborhood in Holon. An array of dozens of Perspex sheets bearing drawings of cats, crows, and falcons done in gel pens. A video work projected on the wall, presents the morning ritual in the park. The exhibition suggests a subversive reading of the notions of nature, culture, femininity, and compassion. It is a process in which the artist is immersed in the animal connection until she becomes a sort of "leader of the band" in a new hierarchy of intimacy.
The installation spreads through the gallery space like a garden/maze: open-mouthed cats - with expressions that signify hunger, thirst, lack, and yowling – turn into a row of urban martyrs. At its center is the video work Madness, a close-up of the body of a breathing cat; the cat's breath turns at times into ripples of water – an imaginary lake or a carpet laid down at the heart of the utopian garden Pesach has created.
The exhibition weaves together critical feminist discourse and issues of ageism and advanced-age femininity. Pesach turns her gaze to the stereotypical image of the "crazy cat lady," appropriating it as a kind of release. She develops a third language and dismantles the differentiation between human and animal. She undermines the accepted cultural conventions, including those regarding aesthetics and power relations between species. She suggests a feminine model that acts from an inner rhythm and interspecies identifications, a gaze full of compassion and empathy toward the animal, and through it toward herself. She utilizes the stereotypical image of the isolated woman who lives with cats to challenge stigmas and establishes the relationship with the animal as a focal point of feminine power.
In her paper Social Organization in the Cat: A Modern Understanding, Professor Sharon Carol-Davis, a veterinarian at the University of Georgia, presents a new perspective on the cat as a social creature living in groups with an internal structure. Thus, Carol-Davis undermines the common perception of cats as isolated, asocial animals. She asserts that the human perception of the term 'social' is based on behavioral patterns of other species and humans (dogs), which does not apply to the world of cats. In her view, a cat develops a unique language with the human facing it – a concrete and intimate system of signs based on an actual relationship rather than a universal code. This insight is visually and poetically manifested in the exhibition. The choice of a cat as a gatekeeper carries a profound symbolic charge. In ancient Egypt, the cat was sacred, considered a manifestation of Bastet, the goddess of fertility and protection. In Japanese culture, the cat is a symbol of good luck, but it is also capable of shape-shifting. In medieval Europe, the cat, and in particular the black female cat, was associated with the figure of the witch, daunting and often seen as the envoy of the devil. Images of cats vary between the domesticated animal and a wild, impossible-to-domesticate being.
The exhibition demonstrates how the artist establishes a new nonhuman relationship, destabilizing binary categories: order versus wildness, garden versus forest, culture versus nature, and woman versus animal.
Editing: Daniel Lantsuz
Assistant Editor: Nadav Pesach
Assistant Editor: IInbal Zirkelevich Ruso
With thanks to: Yair Barak for his guidance and support of the project
Sound Tamar Orr