In her exhibition, Hagar Pundak presents bathtub-like vessels, cast from ceramic and other materials, standing in rows on four legs like beds. Or are they rubber boxes coated with clay and tar, to hold the infant separated from his mother in the biblical story? The bathtub-boxes stand out in their emptiness. They stand as a group in which the details are similar but different, and there is almost no room for an intimate look at the individual. This exhibition was born from Hagar Pundak’s personal journey to adopt her children. A journey in which she was exposed to the world of children living in orphanages around the world (about 140 million as of today), a situation that is constantly worsening, and is now even intensifying due to the current wars. Pundak chose a bathtub – an object that symbolizes the initial, intimate mother-child bond, a bond that is absent from the experience of children in orphanages. Inside the bathtub mold, she cast dozens of castings – from ceramic, concrete, earth, or various plastic materials. Concepts such as belonging, identification, acceptance, and love in the face of absence, rejection, and alienation were transformed into material and translated into the visual expression of the bathtubs, which range from hardness to softness, fullness to emptiness, wholeness to fracture. At the entrance to the gallery, the viewer is greeted by a row of ceramic objects, ranging from figurines to dolls. But unlike that familiar object that opens in the center, Pundak’s “bay-boos” open along their length. They are not adapted to the usual mold, but rather deviate from it. In some of them, a hole opens in the center of the abdomen, a space that screams with its emptiness. A babushka, or matryoshka (in Russian), is a series of hollow dolls, placed one inside the other, a kind of image that symbolizes the chain of female generations: grandmother – mother – child. The experience of adoption, as well as infertility or abandonment, breaks the chain and seeks to establish a heart-to-heart connection that does not stem from blood ties, but from a shared destiny. This is an extraordinary art project, with which the artist seeks to raise awareness about the situation of orphans and the adoption processes in Israel and around the world. Through the material, she seeks to tell the story of the children who are locked up in orphanages and cannot make their voices heard, and the story of the brave families who give them a home. She also hopes that the exhibition will put the issue on the public agenda and turn the spotlight on the chain of difficulties that state laws heap on adoption processes, and on government policy on the subject, which is accompanied by concealment, silencing, and fixation, which reinforce the perpetuation of the situation.