Le Bouquet / Solo Exhibition of Josyane Vanounou

 Curator:  Nir Harmat

The installation “Le Bouquet” (that originated with the exhibition “The Bride’s Dress” curated by Avi Ifergan at the Bar-David Museum) invites the audience into an enigmatic space.

Through a mosaic of video works, drawing, knitting and painting, Josyane Vanounou recreates a photographed moment that occurred before her birth, a moment in which she was not present, which functions as a living memory. Josyane Vanounou builds around it a kind of mise en scène for its dysfunction and failure.

The starting point for the exhibition is an old family photograph of her parents, which the artist found in her aunt’s house. The two figures appearing in the photograph and the story that led to that documented moment are intertwined in the exhibition; many layers of scraps of parchment paper are stacked one on top of the other, telling, revealing and hiding the past, producing a hidden echo of a faded memory. The layers become a ghost of flickering memory.

According to Vanounou: “From my early childhood, I developed the ability to escape from reality to find refuge in fiction, and soon this became an intimate space in which I built another, limitless world. The personal, individual memory is unverifiable; it is a memory that has no proof. Fiction is the material from which I create, in its close-far relationship with the reality of ‘what was’. Fiction exists within reality and constitutes its memory.”

Vanounou tries to recreate that photographed moment. The “closeness” of the two figures, who were apparently asked to stand close together so they both fit into the frame. Their arms, limp on the side of their bodies, like two extras who were invited to pose for an unknown photographer.

In the video works, she performs Sisyphean actions that are doomed to failure. The sequence of repetitious movements intensifies the echo of the reconstructed memory, while the sequence of works seeks to convey the sense of a missed moment.

The name of the exhibition in Hebrew is a word that can be read in two different ways, meaning either a bouquet or a stranger. This double meaning describes the oxymoronic quality of the works on display: It begins with a bouquet of flowers that morbidly decorates that fleeting yet fixed moment. At the same time, it refers to the alienation and the strangeness that lies within that moment.

An anthropomorphic installation in the center of the space simulates the contours of that moment through the abstract figure of the bride. According to the artist: “Choosing ready-made images allows me to determine a concrete starting point connected to a certain reality. The image becomes a material that develops and changes, stretches and peels – containing within it actions whose function is to release from it that which will transform it into a new image; like an avatar, which is the graphic representation of the original image.”

Reduction becomes a compressed substance, a base. There is a restrained silence in it. The video works, the installation and the drawings are silent, self-contained. They are, at the same time, the thing itself that continues to exist, as well as that which has evolved from it.