”Orit Ishay aptly builds up to subtle whispers of details that one might usually miss out on, by extrapolating, editing, creating deconstructions of the heart of the heart of social and political imageries and meanings of home and the solitude of leaving it.”
Orit Ishay
Curator: Cristina Stoenescu
May 12 – June 25, 2023
Anca Poterașu Gallery, Bucharest
Starting a conversation on displacement and its implicit acts of hospitality and hostility, Orit Ishay’s solo show at Anca Poterasu Gallery in Bucharest, Romania, reaches out beyond cartographies and conflicts, focusing on rising fears both past and future-bound, as well as feelings of nostalgia, in the attempt of creating a shared experience of empathy, in the vein of Svetlana Boym’s, words: What is crucial is that nostalgia was not merely an expression of local longing, but a result of a new understanding of time and space that made the division into “local” and “universal” possible, in imagining the future with hope.
Through works such as I can/I can’t (neon work, 2010) and ManaManot (video, 2013), Orit Ishay underlines the nuances between personal stories and the seemingly unmovable and arbitrary socio-cultural contexts that affect lives in irreversible ways. She produces new photographic work specifically for the show, within in-situ installations that further build up to a momentum of a back-and-forth dance between certainty and loss, between uncertainty and shelter, between doors of no-return, as the poetical writer Dionne Brand would imagine.
