"Authentic copy" | Solo exhibition

"Authentic copy" (True to source) - Memory shaping in iron

This exhibition is a visual expression of the process of forming personal and public memory.

The premise is that in a situation of loss, any person would construct and adopt their own unique version of memory, created by their own perspective. Thus, one object of memory may become a different story for different people.

Following several losses I have experienced, including the death of a young man who was close to my family and our community, I found myself witnessing and observing the process in which different memory narratives are formed.

This led me to create in industrial iron a physical equivalent to that process I had witnessed.

While observing the human processes, I created 14 iron objects, which appear figurative from certain angles and devoid of form and logic from others. All these pieces are based on one formative object – the source, which was destroyed after the work was completed.

Like the memory, these objects are different from one another in form, matter – several types of iron and rods – color and texture, going from the raw material to polished iron, from processed iron to crumbling rust.

The presentation features relevant texts; from the body of literature and poetry as well as lines written by people from my own community.

Rami Atar uses the relation between the line and the image, between the two dimensional and the three dimensional to deal with the complex relations between the authentic and the general, between loss as an experience in the world and loss as an inner threat, in the social arena where memory is formed and in the paradoxical position of the remembering person wishing to articulate that memory