Arnovitz Andi

Various events connected with the power and finance mechanisms
of ultra-orthodox institutions as well as those of secular society
have been added over the years to the “blacklist” of injustices and
wrongful acts against the weaker members of society – mainly
women and children, whom Andi Arnovitz highlights in her
works. As in the past, in this exhibition too she turns a penetrating
gaze towards these phenomena and interrogates them in a direct
and uncompromising way, as if wishing to kick at the soft underbelly
of the establishment as well as that of the viewer. The exhibition
deals with the ways in which these institutions operate to undermine
and weaken the individual’s power to control her own body, her
privacy and her selfhood: the rabbinical establishment and the
fertility industry.

Control and the lack thereof also find expression in Arnovitz’s
method of work, which is characterized by repetition and multiplicity.
She repeatedly engages with what she perceives as burning issues.
This is an obsessive engagement, which does not subside, both in the
content of the works and in the repetitive structure of the material and
images. The abundance and the density, which also express connections
between details and their larger reality, reinforce the sense of indignation,
the criticism, the reservations about and the opposition to the phenomena
that the works present for consideration.

The title of the central installation in the exhibition, The Blacklist (2017),
refers to the Israeli rabbinate’s blacklist, which in 2016 listed 6,386 people
who are prohibited from marrying (psulei ḥitun) – bastards, converts,
Cohens who have divorced, and others. This list has been in existence for
decades, and doubts about its legality were raised already in the 1970s, when
Israel’s Attorney-General Meir Shamgar ruled that everyone on the list must
be informed of the fact. The list, however, continues to exist without many of
the citizens included in it being aware of the fact, and without their having the
opportunity to dispute their status. Arnovitz’s installation comprises 6,360
black scrolls, each of them rolled up and tied with a thin thread (a recurrent
motif in her works). They represent people, the vast majority of them women,
whose fate the rabbinical establishment has determined. The dense hanging of
the scrolls on the wall, like a black “color field”, adds an abstract dimension that
evokes a sense of a solid wall, a barrier, an obstacle.

Tamar Gispan-Greenberg