Exhibition: Body Becomes a Place
The Pais Incubator, Dana Art Gallery, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, hosted at MUZA,
Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv
Curator: Ravit Harari
In the beginning
2025
Two
Channel Video Installation"In the Beginning" is a two-channel video installation that explores the reconstruction of childhood memory and the body's movement in space to delve into the experience of belonging to a group, collective learning, and aspects of group therapy. This work is influenced by Eurythmy, a movement language created in the early 20th century as part of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical approach. Eurythmy aims to express music, sounds, and spoken language through bodily gestures and intricate choreography to achieve emotional balance and harmony.
Renana Aldor, a graduate of anthroposophical education, examines a childhood memory from a mature and sober perspective, recreating a eurythmic performance she recalls from her childhood—the performance "Genesis," which deals with the story of creation and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Along with eight dancers, she develops a new choreography for the performance, woven through a shared process of learning and movement. Like the elusive nature of memory, the story gradually takes shape, scene by scene, from fragments of words and movements.
The dramatization of this archetypal story and its emphasis on the expulsion scene serve as a metaphor for the process of adolescence, marked by separation and pain. The choreography unfolds at the empty bottom of the mythological Jerusalem YMCA swimming pool—a symbolically charged space that becomes an arena of transition and transformation in this work. The pool symbolizes pregnancy and birth, and the movement unfolds between the shallow and deep areas of water, suggesting a metaphor for a coming-of-age journey that necessitates detachment, profound immersion, and disillusionment as prerequisites for growth. The installation encompasses two parallel projections: one uses choreographic structures to trace the story of creation and expulsion. The other presents mute
portraits of the participants as they observe each other and sometimes themselves, with inscrutable faces; expressions revealing a spectrum of suppressed emotions and a yearning to reflect on childhood from the distance of time. The work examines issues of belonging, identity formation, and personal development through the body, group dynamics, and a process of coming closer.
Text by Ravit Harari
Installation Images by Elad Sarig