First Aid Station | 2012

First Aid Station offers alternative solutions for various types of emergencies. Illustrations from the official IDF first aid booklet were altered and recreated in mild steel, suggesting new methods for evacuations of wounded soldiers and citizens. Additionally, the videos Rescue and Patient are presented at the station.

ע

תחנת עזרה ראשונה מציעה פתרונות אלטרנטיביים לסוגים שונים של מקרי חירום.

איורים שנלקחו מפנקס עזרה ראשונה הרשמי של צה״ל, צויירו מחדש ונחתכו בפלדה על מנת להציע טכניקות חדשות לפינוי חיילים ואזרחים פצועים.

בנוסף מוצגים בתחנה שני סרטי וידאו – הצלה ופציינט.

FIRST AID STATION | AANDO FINE ART | BERLIN 2012

Guernica | Mild steel, rust | 183 x 422 cm | First Aid Station, Installation view, AANDO Fine Art, Berlin | 2012
First Aid | 2 Prints on archival paper | 135 x 58 cm | Installation view, AANDO Fine Art, Berlin | 2012
Rescue | HD video, 2:30 min | Installation view, AANDO Fine Art, Berlin | 2012 | Watch Online (+Introduction)
Patient | HD video, 6:30 min | Installation view, AANDO Fine Art, Berlin | 2012 | Watch Online (+Introduction)

FIRST AID STATION | THE VAN LEER JERUSALEM INSTITUTE | Properties – Manofim 2018 | Curators: Rinat Edelstein & Lee He Shulov

Text by Rinat Edelstein 2018 | Photographs: Kira Klachki.

First Aid Station offers alternative solutions for various types of emergencies. The figures in the work are based on illustrations taken from official first-aid handbook of the Israel Defense Forces, created in order to propose new techniques for the evacuation of wounded soldiers and civilians. From a distance, the figures look as though they are drawn in fine black line, but from close up one can see that they are made by iron cut, accumulate rust, and are different from the fragile and refined image. Ben Ron’s first aid solutions do not work. Her figures are dismembered and distorted. The frozen gaze on the figures’ faces and injured bodies, combined with the grotesque poses in which they are placed, attest to irreparable wounds, a failed attempt to reassemble a body that can never be the same again. Ben Ron’s focus on the moment of injury, the moment of horror when it is clear that nothing in the body or the soul  will ever return to normal, presents the attempts to provide first aid as meaningless, an illusion that the broken body can be repaired with the help of operating instructions, good intentions, and a band aid. Ben Ron’s choice to linger on this critical moment, with images of wounded soldiers and cold, sterile directions that are supposed to cure the incurable, raises questions about how these figures got into this situation in the first place? Is it possible to get out of it? And most of all, could all of this have been avoided? Ben Ron raises these questions in every figure that is artificially and absurdly reconstructed and thus in a reverse act, instead of the drawings in the first aid manual being of use, her figures become a kind of manual for prevention. Every figure confronts the viewer with the question of the necessity of fighting, in any war that regularly leaves behind wounded soldiers, human beings who live in the aftermath of the trauma.