Some images do not disappear. They sink into the subconscious, wait, recharge, and then return and unfold like a fan—not as they were before, but appearing as a trace, a vibration, a residue.
In the exhibition Reawakening, Uri returns to a seminal visual source: the late Ram Loevy’s film Khirbet Khizeh,* a television drama produced in the late 1970s. She first saw it in her youth, and it had left a quiet but profound and lasting impression on her. This return to the memory is not nostalgic; it is an act of examination, of re-exposure to the power of a mediating/foundational image and the way in which national trauma is absorbed into memory, mediated through the screen.
According to Sigmund Freud, the return of the suppressed is the process by which mental content that has been pushed into the unconscious because it is threatening, forbidden, or anxiety-provoking reappears in an indirect form - in dreams, slips of the tongue, symptoms, or cultural works. What is suppressed does not disappear, but returns and manifests in other ways.
Uri recounts: "I saw the film at the age of 17 (many years before I read the book), at a seminar for high school students. The film unsettled me by giving voice and image to unspoken signs of a calamity that I could only vaguely sense until then. The film showed me the possibility and power of art to mediate reality."**
The paintings are part of a chain of translations: book, film, television, memory, painting. In each incarnation, there is a slight deviation, a disruption, a loss, and a recharge. Uri explores the boundaries of the medium of painting, to which she returns out of compulsion and passion, to carry historical pain and bear witness to it. She does so without attempting to represent it

directly. The images do not recreate scenes; they insist on absence, on what is omitted between the frames or what peeks out from their edges.
Khirbat Hiz'ah, based on the book by S. Yizhar, turns out to be a fraught coming-of-age story: against the backdrop of PALMACH youth culture, the protagonist embarks on an inner journey, torn between moral dilemmas, in the face of the expulsion of a Palestinian village, as his personal identity is formed in parallel to the national ones - Palestinian and Israeli-Zionist. It is a vulnerable threshold moment, in which one identity falls away before another is born, and the transition itself becomes the central scene of action.
The title of the exhibition, Reawakening, is a quote from the protagonist's opening monologue in the film. This term, in Hebrew, refers to an emotional state of awakening or sobering up, but it also sounds like the braying of a donkey. Indeed, the figure of the donkey recurs in the book, the film, and the exhibition. It echoes the Horse from Turin, the encounter with which shook Nietzsche's world, and it reappeared in Béla Tarr's poetic film. Here, the animal symbolizes shouldering a burden and helplessness. But it rejects the text and insists on existing and reminding.
The painting invites a pause. Without sound or linear time, the surfaces carry a material and physical presence: spilled blue, like stifled testimony; red as a covering and a wound; black as a heavy blanket that simultaneously conceals and protects. Characters are hinted at, dissolving, diverging - figures that are signs. Primary states of clinging and disappearing, of control and eruption, are embodied not as a one-time event but as an ongoing situation; an emotional foundation of exile and conquest.
The return to the cinematic image is not a closure but a reopening of the circle. The mature gaze does not seek a solution but allows movement: between seeing and memory, history and matter, testimony and silence. Reawakening is an exhibition about the insistence - of memory, of


painting - to remain present, even when it is cracked, even when it changes, in days when such early work is perceived as a fulfilled prophecy.

* The film, shot by Meir Diskin, was produced by Israeli Television and can be found in the Broadcasting Authority archives.
** This is what Galia Uri wrote to me when I asked her to write a review of the exhibition for me.
*** Published by Sifriyat Poalim, May 1949.