]]> http://ayabenron.com/2011/11/05/a-voyage-to-cythera-%e2%80%a2-2011/feed/ 0 VTC_Nurse_All_X_HR_W01 assistant VTC_Nurse_All_X_HR_W01 http://ayabenron.com/2011/10/29/hanging-hatje-cantz-%e2%80%a2-2012/ http://ayabenron.com/2011/10/29/hanging-hatje-cantz-%e2%80%a2-2012/#comments Sat, 29 Oct 2011 15:46:28 +0000 Aya Ben Ron http://ayabenron.wordpress.com/?p=1551 ]]>

Announcement 

Edited by Suhail Malik

Texts by Sander L. Gilman, Michael Y. Barilan, Michal Ben-Naftali, Suhail Malik

Interview with Galit Eilat

The video was shot at the original location of the Assuta Hospital in Tel Aviv, founded in 1934 by a group of German immigrant physicians. It was designed by Joseph Neufeld in the International Style. “Assuta”, meaning Health in Aramaic, was chosen as the name of the hospital by the poet and physician Saul Tchernichovsky.

In May 2009 the Assuta Hospital relocated to its new building in an affluent neighborhood of Tel Aviv. The original building was sold to real estate developers and is since being transformed into an exclusive residential tower.

‘Patient’ follows a nurse through her daily routine as she tends to the abandoned and ruined hospital. The hospital is treated as a dying building in the last stages of its existence. Its lifeless emptiness, wherein abandoned machinery and left over equipment lay scattered about, resembles an open wound; a body whose organs are revealed as they turn to debris that will eventually decompose.

The camera follows the nurse as she rushes about the empty rooms and corridors. Entering various rooms her actions seem at once random and yet somehow following a warped internal logic. Various sounds emanate throughout the building, machines beeping, windows rattling; a whole orchestra causing the feeling of an immanent crisis which is to end one way or the other before the next one arrives.

Click to view slideshow.

Aya Ben Ron’s “Sisters” is a series of works that creates, by its very title, a wide resonance that associates the familial sisters to sisters who treat their patients in a hospital, on the one hand, and to sisters who lead monastic life, on the other. Ben Ron, who has been dealing throughout the years with different aspects of the medical establishment, or the medical mechanism, complicates her perspective already through this title. Despite the sequence that leads from one piece of work to another [namely, Sisters, Still Life and the film], one cannot say that this is an exhibition on medical care, a critique of the medical institution or even a phenomenology of this establishment. The power of this exhibition lies in the polyvalence of its images and in the existential questions it raises. It is not about the familiar fascination of art facing science. Ben Ron gathers the experience she accumulated by studying thoroughly medical manuals [here, for example, sketches of respiration machines and different birth positions] in order to overcome the categorical articulation between Art and Science, with all the options that this articulation might imply: from an aesthetization of the pathological to a bio-political critique. In this sense, the medical world which constitutes the theme of this exhibition is both critical and uncritical. Privileging medicine is a result of medicine being “closer” so to speak to what interests Ben Ron, something that daily experience rarely allows us to see. This fact does not result from a medical manipulation of sick persons or from their objectification. It results first and foremost from the fact that this world reveals something precious about living human beings.

Let us return to “Sisters”. Through wooden reliefs Ben Ron succeeds in creating a vast though ambivalent and somewhat abstract interior space. Indeed, it looks like a hospital. But nevertheless, the beds are empty. The sheets are put cautiously but leave the impression of being intact. It is as if the sisters themselves are hospitalized. It is an empty space that includes those who are needy, those who are apparently withdrawn from life. But the Exhibition asks in various ways where does life take place. And even: what is life?

The sister that stands at the heart of the triptych, as severe and as quiet as the rest of her sisters, resembles the christic figure. The lamp above is hung like a cross. But the crucified here is not a figure who is persecuted from without. Everything takes place within. The sisters’ community takes the place of the fraternal community of equality and friendship, in a world evacuated from both the Law of the Father and the socialization of the Sons. But what arouses the attention, here and in the other works, are the eyes. The uniform costume, the disciplined hands stretched out behind – make the eyes the only expressive organ. These are shut cataract eyes, white and empty, which look like an artificial organ that condemns them to become even more intimate. The sisters do not look at each other. Even the sister who looks at the window seems to be standing in front of an opaque frontier, which does not reflect the outside.

Ben Ron’s great and paradoxical chain of being reach its peak with the work “Still Life”, a merry-go-round populated by babies and respiration machines, where life is given and taken almost at the same time. The children’s play with wooden horses’ vertiginous movement, usually associated with the wild pleasure of amusement parks, with a preliminary experience of adventure and the readiness to lose control – in front of a machine that feels like a natural force – now becomes the play of babies who are speechless, who have no mother tongue, babies who cannot make the fort-da game their own. In this scene of life as life-death, the name of the game is not gaining control but having no control at all.

Here also, and in a more radical sense than in the Sisters’ series, the image has an inherent movement which is almost theatrical. Here also, and in a more elementary manner than what takes place among the discrete sisters, we witness a traumatic entrance into life, life that apparently does not deserve its name, the life of babies who do not cry since they are refused the semiotic access into the symbolic order. The trauma of the naissance is highly activated through a monstrous machine and hybrid babies. The machine seems to be another organ of their own bodies.

What is life? In each and every manifestation of life we are allowed to see in this exhibition there is life, even if only in an elementary sense. In each and every manifestation there is what we could call, while adapting our conceptual vocabulary, a rhythmic doing, even if these doings are monotonous and almost static.

We often hear the claim suggesting that this life does not merit its name, or witness the painful complaints of the subject himself or herself saying that his or her life does not worth the effort to live, that it is not a life at all. But Ben Ron is not interested in such statements. She focuses upon those human situations in which the question, in its normative mode, does not appear at all. The figures she presents do not express in any sense that their life is not a life. They live, and with them live other notions of life, other modalities of living. Medicine is not represented here necessarily from its manipulative or demonic side. Medicine extends the question of life worthy of its name from life’s impersonal, existential aspect, an aspect which is altogether indifferent to the categories of the inside or the outside. An aspect which is not troubled by questions of meaning. Life in its point zero, the sheer fact of its happening.

Michal Ben-Naftali, a writer, a translator and the editor of the series “The French” in HakKibutz Hameuchad Publishing House.

Download hebrew version

A three chapter film about patients in a permanent vegetative state (PVS).

Shot at the Head Injury departments of Reuth Medical Center in Tel Aviv over a period of two years, ‘Shift’ documents the lives of patients, their families and various care staff. Although PVS Patients are unconscious, they sustain a cycle of sleep and wakefulness (as distinct from comatose, where patients are unconscious and have no sleep-wake cycles). The kind of care provided by modern medicine and technology enables these patients to live for many years. ‘Shift’ raises crucial ethical dilemmas regarding the underlying social and moral codes intended on preserving human life.

Chapter 1

Centers on the routine of life in the unit. It follows the interaction between the patients and the various care staff: doctors, nurses, paramedics, physiotherapists, music, and animal therapists. This interaction is at once simple and intricate. Simple, as it tends to basic existential needs; and intricate due to the absence of normative communication.

Chapter 2 

Follows the relationship between patients and family members. A father tells his son about a trip he took; another jokes around while feeding his 38 year old son; a sister plays music for her brother; a mother recalls a childhood memory to her son, encouraging him to try to remember it himself. A stand alone camera documents these four monologues.

Chapter 3

An interview with Dr Y. Michael Barilan, a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, and internal medicine specialist. He teaches medical ethics and philosophy, and serves as head of Meir Hospital Ethics Forum. He publishes on human rights, bioethics, art & medicine.

10 x 1.67 x 0.075 meters