Live event and exhibition, Curator: Galia Bar Or

 

 

Commissioned by The Museum of Art, Ein Harod for the inauguration of its new auditorium, The Silver Salver opened on New Year's Eve 2012. Actresses clad in sumptuous bleeding, dripping Israeli fruits sculpted in foam performed actions that were at once humorous, hysterical, embarrassing and lyrical, and were "served up" to the Israeli public on a gigantic silver platter that lined the museum floor. They approached the visitors, beckoning, pleading, yelling, groaning; asking them to wipe, wet, touch and assist them in numerous ways.

 

At the climax of the live performance, which combined sound and a variety of media, a giant chickpea structure activated by four crewmen was unveiled like a sacred monument and rounds of boiled chickpeas were fired at the spectators present in the auditorium.

 

Those visiting the exhibition could see the debris of the night of 30.12.2011 in the guise of film extracts and scenery reminiscent of the aftermath of a party; the defecated walls of the museum, the once-living sculptures strewn about like cadavers, buckets of blood, urine, syringes and undergarments.  They lay there like the "remains of the arduous day and the night of fire" of Nathan Alterman's epic poem titled "The Silver Platter", which is often read on National Memorial Day in Israel. Published in Haaretz Newspaper in 1947, before the establishment of the State of Israel, the poem predicts the human sacrifice that would inevitably occur in future wars and that it would be made by the youngest "fruits" of Israel's loins.

 

The Silver Salver plunges into the gut of Israeli society, picking apart the elements which constitute "its reality of aggression  and imagined identity" (Galia Bar Or) and candidly examines what are the real "fruits" exported by Israel, and at what cost.