DORIS ARKIN & ANONYMOUS ARTISTS, Installation

DORIS ARKIN & ANONYMOUS ARTISTS, Installation

Matter, 2019 Sheet metal, emery cloth, and leather cord,  private collection of maternity statuettes from different regions and periods

As part of group exhibition “If I was Body”, petach tikva museum of art, Curator: Irena Gordon. February – June 2025

Doris Arkin creates sculptures and installations through an ongoing laborious manual process of cutting and joining, piercing and connecting, in materials such as iron and bronze, fabric, paper, wax, threads, scrap metal, and personal objects. From all of these, she assembles grids and weaves, which in turn spawn three-dimensional bodies, structures that record personal and collective memory as vestiges of an absent presence. The work Matter alludes to the material of creation and the universe, while also encapsulating the word “mother” (mater, in Latin). It is a sculpture resembling a well or a basket from which a cloth of sorts flows. Both emerge as primordial matter, with the textile seemingly stretching and spilling outwards. The oozing mass carries memories and emotions of the vulnerable body, of which only traces remain as soft-looking remnants despite their actual rigidity. The work was first exhibited at the Beit Uri and Rami Nehostan Museum, Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov Meuhad.

An integral part of Arkin’s sculptural work is a private collection of fertility and maternal figurines. The collection, assembled over more than 15 years from various sources, includes figurines from the Middle and Far East, Europe, Africa, and America, which represent diverse and distinct aspects of motherhood in ancient and tribal cultures. The physical motional expression of the figurines in the collection is interwoven in Matter, forming a timeless artistic dialogue that introduces a space for reflection on the nature of human bonding.

About the group exhibition,

The exhibition If I was Body brings together artists who explore the fragility and incompleteness of the body in all its physical and psychological, human and non-human manifestations. It is a body currently immersed in an existential struggle, but it’s being is imbued with the memory and history of things. Despite its physicality, it is an abstract spirit and consciousness, a corpus of speech and thought embedded in matter.

An unbearable local reality simmers in the background of the exhibition, a reality in which the bodies of individuals and the civilian body as a collective are exposed to constant danger, enduring a state of emergency, ongoing war and trauma. At the same time, the exhibition is grounded in contemplation of the nothingness at the heart of the body as a concept—an intermediary between us and the world, transpiring along the continuum between the living-organic and the inanimate, mechanical, and virtual. In Israeli art, the body is never self-evident; it is always elusive, demanding a redefinition, partly due to the weight of religious and social perceptions.

The participating artists create political and primeval, physical and emotional, autonomous and sensual bodies—occurrences, images, and objects that are pushed and pulled, hovering and breaking, while exploring the gaps between being and void, place and time.

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Photos credit: Meidad Suchowolski