Curator: Tami Katz-Frieman
Edna Ohana's sculpture Filiality depicts a male figure bent over a sewing machine, as if frozen in mid-work. This white wax cast stands out in contrast to the psychedelic atmosphere of avaf's wallpaper installation and distills the underlying theme of "BoysCraft" - men who sew, knit and embroider. The word "filiality" is borrowed from a text by Emanuel Levinas, which discusses the status of the son (filiin Latin) as an "other" who enables the father to exceed the limits of his own identity (Emanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo). In this work, Ohana attempts to conjure up the figure of her father, a tailor, and to endow him with the estranged, immortal quality of a ghost. The male model used by the artist to create this cast was artist Uri Gershuni, the son of painter Moshe Gershuni. This detail endows the work with an additional meaning, which touches upon the relations between fathers and sons in the wider contexts of Israeli art.