Celan
A special collaboration between Sorel Cohen and Barbara Todd
Opening Thursday, January 15 at 5 p.m.
The exhibition runs from January 15 to February 21, 2004.
The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m.
Each year, Dazibao invites two artists who have never worked together to collaborate on an exhibition. Sorel Cohen and Barbara Todd found a common inspiration in the texts of Paul Celan, a Jewish poet who wrote in German about the Holocaust. Through video, photography, texts and sculpture, the artists circumscribe the threshold between speech and silence, between the concrete and the immaterial, expressing visually the themes and concerns common to both their work and the poet’s.
It’s time the stone consented to bloom.
from Corona
For some time Todd has been preoccupied with stones, both as object and metaphor. The uncomfortable idea of a mouthful of stones is, for the classical Greek orator, a cure for stuttering, and for Paul Celan, a metaphor for all poetic utterance. Mouthful of Stones (1996) was Todd’s first work to deal directly with this theme. This quilt was part of a series of dark blue and black quilts that dealt with issues of security, domesticity and the inner self. It attempted to thoughtfully and broadly answer the question: From what can we protect our children? Whether bad dreams or nuclear bombs, the blankets seemed to be the most honest safety a mother could offer. From her exquisite quilts, for which she has gained wide renown, Todd has branched out to other evocative materials. In this new body of work she etches the shapes of seaside stones into glass. Treated in this way the shapes resemble the residue of breath on a window, a fragile index of the threshold between inside and outside the body. Juxtaposed with this imagery are fragments of text from Celan’s poetry, selected by Todd for their allusion to the struggle with words, the effort it takes to go from silence to speech, and back again.
Largely autobiographical, Sorel Cohen’s works draw upon art historical and various textual references to give voice to her experiences as an artist, a woman and a Jew. She is perhaps best known for her large body of photographic pieces on the motif of the bed. As sites of sleep, dreams, love and loneliness they have served the artist in offering insight into our psychological selves. Her works in this exhibition operate as metaphoric counterpoints to Paul Celan’s moving poem, Todesfuge (Deathfugue), or more precisely, the evocative refrain at the end of each verse:
dein goldenes Haar
Marguerite (your golden hair Marguerite)
dein aschenes Haar
Shulamith (your ashen hair Shulamith)
Taking this refrain as a condensation of the history of the Germans and
the Jews, with all its historical tragedy, Cohen sets Shulamith as the
Jewish pole and Marguerite as the German pole. Shulamith is the woman
at the centre of the Biblical Song of Songs, a collection of verses
on the theme of earthly and erotic love. In Cohen’s installation,
Shulamith is represented by a menorah, which is drawn directly onto the
wall. A video loop transforms the menorah into a cenotaph with seven flames.
Within the flames, the images of the artist’s lost female relatives
are memorialized as the ashen symbol of the destruction of European Jews.
Recalling Goethe’s poem, Faust, Celan's Marguerite is implied
solely by a large tondo, within which the shape of a swastika reveals
itself to the viewer. Pulling elements from the ancient past the menorah
was inspired by a floor mosaic in a Babylonian-era synagogue, her own
personal history and the present, Cohen’s installation allows for
a multidimensional visual representation of Celan’s haunting poem.