Private Papers and a photo
Nurit Gur Lavy (Karni)
Curator: Yair Barack
Private Papers and a Picture is a complex, multi-part work. The entire assembly is enigmatic, characterized by fragmentary aesthetics. It gives off a whiff of a puzzle that necessitates solving. Photographic engravings from pieces of a photograph of the Kaplan family, engravings based on redacted phrases from Sarah Kaplan's writings, to historical portraits, the back of an old picture, and a video work showing the artist talking with her mother about intimate texts written by her grandmother, many sections of which have been censored by the mother. The connections between the parts of the whole are not self-evident and require an act of peeling away layers to expose the conceptual logic of the work.
Gur Lavie (Karni) 's work is a sort of biographical decoding. It is a journey in the footsteps of what has not been told, of words written but not meant to be read. A private story of a family, but' at the same time, the collective story of this place and, in particular, the women who had lived here.
The work is based on archival materials, including a family photograph taken in 1904 at a studio in Minsk, Belarus. The family members are depicted against a fake, archaic, fancy backdrop; the men are in uniforms, and the women all wear identical dresses and hair ribbons. Gur Lavie (Karni) deconstructs the photograph into fragments: close-ups of the face, body parts, and abstract images taken from the background. She reconstructed the puzzle without the omitted parts. Even after the reconstruction, it is not whole, and the traces of the missing parts remain undeciphered.
The work "Deleted Sentences" addresses similar notions in different ways. Its starting point was intimate papers, bare and revealing, torn from a mysterious notebook belonging to Sarah Kafri, the artist's grandmother. They were printed and given to Sarah's daughter, the artist's mother, for reading. While she read them, she redacted parts of the text that she found too revealing and unpublishable. Gur Lavie (Karni) reprinted the redacted texts and made them a central part of the work. Here, too, as in the disassembled family photo, the missing parts assume a dramatic presence, and their absence is at the core of the work.
Gur Lavie (Karni)'s treatment of local history, with its human, familial, and political strata, has been very present in her work in recent years. It is apparent in her series of flower paintings, combines as "Flora Palestina" books, which provide a unique ethical and aesthetical interpretation of the botanical history of the local realm, and, in a different manner, in the paintings of Gaza, based on an aerial photograph of the Gebaliyah refugee camp she had found while searching for aerial photographs of the Karni Pas, named after her father. Evidently, Gur Lavie (Karni)'s personal story, her family's history, and her interest in them are her roots, and their passage from the private realm into public discourse is almost immediate. In many ways, we could state that for Gur Lavie (Karni), the poetic is also political, and vice versa.
The postmodernist thinking of the 1970s and 1980s has taught us to observe reality and how historical stories are transmitted in various ways. Seeking to make the "other" voice heard and not accept the hegemonic story as self-evident has become the standard in literature, art, and historical writing. In the work at the heart of this book, Gur Lavie (Karni) adopts one of the main practices of the post-modern discourse – deconstruction. First, she deconstructs the whole: the family photograph is disassembled into sub-units, creating a cluster of individual stories from a group story. She then reconstructs it as a collection of fragments that no longer make a whole. The redaction of the "problematic" texts is, on the one hand, an act of censorship, while on the other, it is an act of deconstruction and rewriting the story. Gur Lavie (Karni)'s choice to preserve the redaction marks and highlight them (in the video work) articulates another aspect of deconstruction as a practice: exposing the mechanism and displaying it.
It is essential for me to address another act present in this body of work. Both the texts and the photographs, as they are being transformed into engravings, undergo a significant change of scale. The considerable enlargement changes how they are read in several ways, as it reveals to us tiny details that escape the eye in the original magnification of the images. I see it as an attempt to find a hidden truth, to prove the existence of things, to make the invisible present. In this context, we might think of Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow-Up, and the obsessive actions of the photographer character in the film, who tries desperately to discover incontrovertible evidence of a murder. However, the act of enlarging also has a significant aesthetic purpose. It exposes the material, the fibers of the paper, the ravages of time, the changes in color, and the texture. These acquire substantial visual values and create the transcendent transformation of the routine and banal into their existence in the aesthetic realm.