Iron Sculpture
Kri’ah(Tearing), 1996
Kri’ah(Tearing), 1996
Welded Iron
14H x 14W x 4D in
Essay by Hana Kofler
Kri’ah is a minimalist wall sculpture alluding to Jewish mourning tradition, presenting the image of a ripped iron collar. It summarizes, in my opinion, Orna Ben-Ami’s obsessive dealing with the essence of existence, with the wandering from ‘here’ to ‘there’, with the nature of death and the nurture of life, with the passage between personal memory and collective memory, themes which accompany her artistic creation since the beginning. Kri’ah is a ritual act that materializes, in Ben-Ami’s hands, into a definition of an existential state. Kri’ah confronts a life overflowing with parting and acceptance, departure and relocation, recognition of the end, along with the revival of readjustment.
In the transformation that takes place between that ritual act and its sculptural realization, Ben-Ami tests the capacity of an artwork to represent, to contain and to express the place, the time and the mood in which it is created. Simultaneously, she examines her ability to create a thing that is devoid of a certain time or place, the essence of which is the presentation of experience.
If we are to assume that the chronology of the artist serves as a non-detachable element of the work, then the birth of art out of death, as in the case in question, is the replacement of the experience of loss with creation, with all that implies. Ben-Ami summarizes autobiographical boiling points and freezes them in matter. As in the case of Kri’ah, which is none other than the memory of a traumatic experience, the death of her sister while she was a child, having donned form and mass. The further the experience abstracted in her consciousness, it seems to have become a sublimation of death and of detachment, of farewell and of escape. The projections of the private experience on the collective are recognized in the final product, which can also be viewed separately from Ben-Ami’s personal story. This is due to the fact that the fusion between autobiographical meanings and universal symbolism is a typical expression of her overall artistic mission. A cultural/traditional image has been processed and formulated to an aesthetic essence and to an artistic concept within which a social, political statement of protest, both local and universal, is contained. The sculpture breaks out of private territory and becomes public domain by virtue of its visual presentation and due to the power of the mute statement, which thunderously froze at the location in which it is exhibited. It forms a new link that raises the trivial value of its objects onto emblematic spheres, into symbols of abandonment, of relocation, of wondering, of farewell, of a tearing away, and of a call for reconciliation with the personal condition as experienced by any human being, and by herself...