The Blue will Shine White

Tamar Nissim

27.12.2018-26.01.2019

Indie Gallery, Tel Aviv

The scent of soap envelops the gallery space. The exhibition The blue will
shine white is part of a broad project in which traces Tamar Nissim how the Zionist homeland was built. The exhibition rewoven memories of her childhood home, validating them vis à vis archival findings. Contemplate the association between the nuclear family and nation-building, the different nationalities of the immigrants to Israel who became ethnic communities, illuminating those who shared in paving the way for the people to become a state and shedding light on their role.

The exhibition is based on archival research comprising collections of texts
from specific historical periods, press clippings, contemporary articles,
interviews with women who grew up during the British Mandate, visits to
museums, marketplaces, household objects and cleansing materials. The
artworks embody an intergenerational transfer among women – women who lived in Mandatory Palestine-Eretz Israel in general, and the women of her family in particular. Her Bukharian grandmother had a deep sense of proper hygiene and would scrub and polish the entire house. She would even wash the banana skin before eating it. Months into the work process, she found a document in the Tel Aviv Municipal archive urging residents to avoid purchasing bananas from shady street peddlers. The crossmatching stories color the hygienic anxiety with national anxiety and vice versa.

A glass bell-shaped fly trap installed in the Gallery’s entrance area. With its
delicate dimensions, it has a noble aspect, like a small “Shrine of the Book” ¹
made of glass. The contrast between the aesthetics of the transparent
structure and its target, the winged creature which spreads filth, is misleading. “Flies are the source of all diseases”², states the pamphlet attempting to teach all of the residents of the state-in-the-making how to contain the threat. The fly is a creature against which all must take up arms to destroy it. The glass bell installed in the Gallery prioritizes cleaning and being captivated by the ideal of absolute cleanliness.

A table with a display of a representative sampling of stains stands in the
middle of the gallery. This is an archive from a precise alphabetical list of
types of stains the housewife is likely to be faced with, with instructions how toclean them.

The video work Braided floods the viewer, with an obsessive sensation of
careful attention to outer appearance and principled order. Nissim’s daughter is depicted braiding her hair, with quick hand movements, and long fingers. Her camera follows the braiding from three angles.

On the opposite wall, The blue will shine white, a video in two “acts.” The
first part shows her daughter’s hands as she carves into the soap, carefully
keeping up a continuous action which turns into despair. Nissim’s voice can be heard retelling to memories of her grandmother, her relationship with her mother and her daughter, sharing about events and the pieces of information that came together to form the exhibition. The second part shows her daughter moving a pile of soaps from one side to the other, brushing away layers of dirt accumulated in the cracks. In the background, Nissim’s mother is telling about her childhood. The work demonstrates the Zionist enterprise that set as one of its goals the building of a proper society, a hardworking, “starched and pressed” society. Nissim confronts her childhood memories of the cleaning that went on in her grandmother’s house as contrasted with her own home, and as compared with the country’s cultural history that take on form.

On the wall a document from the Tel Aviv Municipal Archive warning about
bananas, framed and hung, beside the video Bananas in a monitor.
Washing a banana in warm water turns out to be a process that blackens the skin. The action, as depicted in the video Bananas, remains unclear, spilling out of the kettle towards the viewer like magic, is a trick that mixes the definitions of black and white. The title of the piece is demeaning Hebrew slang for women (bananot, i.e. bananas, instead of banot, “girls”), originating in the sound of the name of a phallic fruit. The video relates to the document as a diptych.

A shelf displaying a variety of soaps of oil and floral essences, along the same wall. The soaps recall fossils, as if they are finds from the archaeology of hygiene. Basic household tasks, such as folding laundry, making a bed, are colored in incipient nationalism. A critical viewpoint is laid out on the events along with self-criticism for leaning on the traces of memory, on one more primus stove, one more bar of soap, and yet another soap. The scents accumulate, enter the nostrils, and penetrate into the body.

1 https://www.imj.org.il/en/wings/shrine-book
2 Title of a booklet published by the Department of Health of the Government of Palestine Eretz Israel.