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Art in America |
January 2001
Hana Iverson at Eldridge Street Synagogue
by Miriam Seidel
Hana Iverson's site-specific multimedia installation at Eldridge Street Synagogue performed a kind of elegant healing ceremony on this historic building, speaking in multiple ways to the decayed structure and to the religious traditions it embodies.
In a empty shaft whose long-collapsed stairs once connected the synagogue's main floor and its women-only balcony, a forty foot fall of white cloth was illuminated by a huge, projected video image of hands (the artist's) sewing parchment. A collage of voices --elderly and younger women, many with connections to the synagogue or its Lower East side neighborhood--reminisced, sang and prayed in an audio loop that played glancingly off the video.
Iverson's video work has always been informed by strong body awareness and use of the body as metaphor. Here, starting with a sense of the synagogue as body (a thought easily available to Christians), she concisely posited the shaft as wound, representing the rift between men and women congregants and, more generally, the historic exclusion of women from the Jewish sacred processes. The white cloth, which evoked the curtain that further separates the women's balcony in Orthodox synagogues such as Eldridge, here read as a bandage. This, along with the sewing video, suggested a binding and closing of the wound.
Parchment, of course, is skin, and the video also carried several meanings. By suggesting the traditional sewing together of lengths of parchment to make Torah scrolls, it deepened the metaphor from that of "healing" a physical space to one of working on the living body of tradition. Such a rich symbolic engagement bears comparison with Helene Aylon's video installation The Liberation of G-d, with its repetitive highlighting of misogynist passages in the Old Testament. Where Aylon appropriated the Jewish men's prerogative of performing commentary, Iverson proceeded here from outside the liturgy--the excluded women's sphere, place of sewing and healing. The commanding but ethereal video apparition in the stairwell reinforced the imaginal nature of Iverson's remedy. It also recalled similar ghostly summonings in the work of Shimon Attie--projections on the walls and through water, in European cities that witnessed the loss of Jews and Jewish culture during the Holocaust. An expansion of Iverson's project to the web and to European cities is planned; however it materializes, she has already joined the company of artists like Aylon and Attie, Christian Boltanski and Eleanor Antin, who use the languages of installation and multimedia to throw light on the layered complexities of their religious heritage.
01: Art In America
Hana Iverson at Eldridge Street Synagogue
by Miriam Seidel
02: Village Voice
On Edge
by C. Carr
03: Forward
Returning to the Fold On Their Own Terms
by Stanley Mieses
04: Jewish Week
Fabric of Their Lives
by Susan Josephs
05: Time Out New York
Immigrant Song
by Billie Cohen