The Petach Tikva Museum of Art presents Itzik Badash: Zala on view through 16 February 2011.
Female-sung eulogy, customary in Jewish congregations hailing from Islamic countries, is at the core of Itzik Badash’s new video work, Zala. Zala is an ancient Arab-Libyan designation for a keen wailer, the female medium who intertwines life and death in the female generational chain. Combining autobiographical, cultural and historical elements associated with the tradition of Libyan Jewry, Badash’s work delves into rites and rituals of life and death.
Badash’s family has set up a tribe of wailers, headed by Badash’s great grandmother, “Liza Zala.” Her family perished in Tripoli in World War II, and she has made her grief into a dirge, bequeathing this age-old tradition to the women in her family. Badash raises a great lament for this Jewish world, which was cut off from its origins and customs, against the backdrop of the Holocaust of North African (and Libyan) Jewry, which was pushed to the margins of public consciousness.
The dramatic presentation of the lament as an aesthetic of grief is intended to create a community of mourning as part of a social and spiritual process which channels emotion towards cathartic release. Badash pits the single wailer as a leading voice opposite a group of women gathering around her, intermittently responding to her gestures and voice. This choreography of weeping, between a female solo and the show of the chorus, produces an orchestrated musical-theatrical array, which heightens the power of the spiritual outpouring.
Badash fuses together symbols of affluence and death, Jewish and Christian myths, with a range of meanings pertaining to transformation and change. The work brings contents that have been repressed in Israeli culture to the fore, reinstating a popular traditional practice that has not been granted profound attention in contemporary art to the center of cultural discussion.
Petach Tikva Museum of Art
30 Arlozorov St.
Pob 1, Petach Tikva
49100, Israel
www.petachtikvamuseum.com