The project presents life that is given and taken away simultaneously.

Sisters is a series of wooden reliefs featuring idle nurses waiting in empty wards.

Still Life is a wooden sculpture of self-sufficient babies forming a Merry-Go-Round.

Shift, DV, 29 min. Shift is a documentary about patients in a persistent vegetative situation, shot at the Head Injury Department of Reuth Medical Center in Tel Aviv. The video follows the daily routine of the patients, their families, and care staff over a period of two years | Watch Online (+Introduction)

Director: Aya Ben Ron | Cinematographer: Oded Kimhi | Editor: Aya Ben Ron, Danit Sigler | Sound Design: Binya Reches | Executive Producer: Drora Arad | Stills Photographer: Nini Moshe || The film was produced with the support of The Estate of Ursula Merkin.

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The series of works under the title Shift began in 2019, when I started filming the film Shift at the Reut Medical Center in Tel Aviv. For two years, I stayed in two departments for patients with chronic vegetative state. A chronic vegetative state is a prolonged medical condition in which the body maintains basic functions such as breathing and sleep–wake cycles, but shows no sign of awareness or self-consciousness. Patients are unable to communicate or respond voluntarily to their surroundings, and there is no hope of recovery. It is a condition in which life continues, but the person themselves is absent.
The initial motivation to film the work was a desire to understand what the “minimal form of life” is, if one can define it as such, and to observe it closely. The staff in the departments kept asking me repeatedly: Why are you here? Why do you care? What are you looking for here? My answer was: Why did you choose to be here? What are you looking for here? Why do you care? After all, the staff could also have chosen to work in other departments, with more hope. Ultimately, the film revolves around this question – around the meaning of the term care, both in its professional and emotional senses.
The film focuses on the around-the-clock maintenance of the patients: cleaning, feeding, physical activity, and attempts at communication with them. Dedicated care and personal attention prevent them from dying, keeping them alive in this way for many years. In most cases, families return day after day, despite there being no change in the patient’s condition. The departments themselves are almost entirely hidden from public view. They attract no media interest because there is no “fixing,” no hope, or success stories, only maintenance and preservation, which are neither visually compelling nor meaningful in other ways. One of the most interesting things that occurred during filming was the sense of recognition from the staff and families: suddenly, someone was seeing them, taking an interest in the condition they had been “stuck” in for years. There was a feeling that something was happening, changing in the department, and that was one of the reasons I stayed there for so long.
I sought additional ways to express the complex emotional landscape that emerged during filming, which became the basis for the still-life sculpture and the series of reliefs entitled Sisters. In both works, an even more extreme condition is presented. Still Life deals with life frozen from the moment of birth, and the Sisters series depicts caregivers who have no one to care for.
Still Life is a sculpture in the form of a carousel of ventilated infants. The infants are based on illustrations from 19th-century gynecology books, depicting various conditions in which the fetus is positioned incorrectly in the womb, leading to complex and life-threatening deliveries for both fetus and mother. I was fascinated by the idea of prenatal failure: even before entering the world, the fetus is already “not as it should be.”
In the sculpture, the ventilators block the infants’ mouths, so they cannot make a sound, but at the same time they maintain themselves in an autarkic way. They do not need a mother. The ventilated infants are attached to sticks embedded in a circular stage. I was often asked: Why doesn’t the carousel turn? And my answer is: It does turnת inside your mind. Behind the sculpture lies the idea of a maintenance system for motherless infants, who, although able to function with a certain ease, cannot escape the loop, and are therefore doomed to remain in this state forever.
The Sisters series depicts nurses from the early 20th century, waiting in empty rooms for patients who have yet to arrive, have already left, or have died. They stand beside empty beds, tense and waiting. The term “Sisters” travels between different meanings: professional nurses in a hospital, sisters within a family, and sisters – members of religious orders who worked in hospitals or charitable institutions, combining professional care with moral and spiritual responsibility. The absence of patients effectively drains the role of its substance. Only in one work in the series is there a patient – It is unclear whether the nurse is breaking his joint or caring for him

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SHIFT | PARASITE | TEL AVIV 2010

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SHIFT | AANDO FINE ART | BERLIN 2010

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7 SISTERS | THE EIN HAROD MUSEUM 2009

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STILL-LIFE MODEL

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