Motherland, 2001
a video-artwork / duration 4 min

This video-artwork titled Motherland, opens with an image of a woman dressed in black, standing with her back to the camera, facing the panoramic view of Old Jerusalem. In this picture, woman and landscape draw equal attention; visually, no one component is more prominent than the other, thus the viewer’s gaze goes back and forth between the two. If the woman were facing the camera then most of the visual attention would be directed towards the woman, and the holy city would become mere background. Yet, since the woman’s face is hidden, her presence is symmetric with the landscape. The visual balance between woman and holy site creates a simplistic, poster-like picture with no ambiguities – woman and sacred site are one and the same vision.

In the following scenes I unravel the initial image: the camera approaches the woman from a closer range, setting the Old City in the background and bringing the woman’s expression to the fore. The first close view is a profile; the woman is chewing appetizingly with a mouth-full; a fly that walks on her forehead is no disturbance to this fulfilling moment. Next, the palms of her hands move restlessly across her face as if wanting to both caress her-self and hide her gaze. Then her neck is at our eye level, and she’s guttering inaudible syllables towards the sky.

Next, attention is shifted to the matter of a woman and her children. The camera looks over the woman’s shoulder; a miniature photograph is set on her thigh, which shows a young mother, without a headdress, wearing colored clothes, not black, reclining on the grass with her two children. The woman black’s fingers traces the head of the young boy in the photo, hiding the other child with her hand. We then see the other child, a smiling little girl, when the photo is held by the woman in a crib-like form.  She then raises the photograph in the air, with her two hands straight in front of her, so that the site of the Golden Dome is right beside the image of the mother and two children.

The prevalence of images in the media, of women holding up photographs of their deceased loved ones to the camera, inspired this scene, and this may correspond to the initial image, yet, my reference to women is not necessarily of a certain sector; in whichever culture’s context the roles of commemorators and bearers of the lament are given to women. The concealment of the dimensions of a woman`s personal feelings, beliefs, opinions are into the domain of the social ritual.

Before I bind my observations, I will mark one more camera approach towards the woman. There are segments in this work which occurred spontaneously while shooting. One such unplanned situation is when she looks over her shoulder at the cameraman with dismay while trying to relieve her foot from the weight of her body. Another un-staged scene is of the woman seated on the ground and chatting in nonchalance with the cameraman. In exposing the woman as myself, out of the performance mode, I assert that we, my viewers and I, are one and of the same. And when I look straight at the camera man, then from the point of view of the audience I am looking straight at them; I have crossed from the illusion into the actual space in which they are, and I have become a part of their community.

The poster-like symmetry of a woman, in singular shade, is a sight which is easily taken in aesthetically, but in the mode of all bias, it must bear underlying disruptions. In Motherland I show the gap between the seemingly perfect that we take for granted, and the asymmetry that emerges from looking closer.