The work was created following Raban’s acquaintance with Ahlam, a Palestinian artist from Hebron who had stayed with her in the Cité artists' colony in Paris. This natural, informal encounter could only have taken place outside of Israel’s tragic reality. In the video, Ahlam – whose religion forbids her to sing to an audience – is shown cutting Raban’s hair. Raban performs the movements accompanying the song the way she learned them from Ahlam, and plays the voice of her Palestinian colleague.
October 2002
Off Dress
This work, created after the completion of the “dress” trilogy, signifies Raban’s return to the original idea of S/Bubblue, the first part of the dress trilogy, without the lighting and music that accompanied that work. The unstitching of the dress, a therapeutic activity related to the body’s centers of energy, refers to the work of Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovic, albeit without the violence associated with their works. Here, the unstitching act is an act of self-acceptance. A text about the mother-daughter relationship serves as a poetic accompaniment to Raban’s actions.
March 2004
Tamar Raban, Rock, Paper and Scissors
(With Yoav Raban)
The performance, presented in the format of a class, exposes the political precisely in the mundane context of personal, everyday life. The class format is used to present the story – at the same time real and allegorical – of the dead calf at the Qalqilia Roadblock, highlighting the callousness and ignorance fostered by the political conflict. A competitive children’s game – Rock, Paper and Scissors – is turned into a dark, lethal match which blurs the distinction between occupier and occupied. Raban’s work is in dialogue with Joseph Beuys’s board works, in which the pedagogic and the artistic, the classroom and the art space, were intermixed.
May 2004
Performance Art Platform’s Inaugural Event at the New Central Station, Tel Aviv
At the opening event, Raban talked to the projected image of the late Dan Zakhem. Zakhem’s video image was part of Zakhem and Raban’s collaborative work, Live Life, based on their recorded conversations. (This is the only videotape related to this project that survived the fire at Beyt Merkazim.) Their conversations addressed, among other issues, their doubts about founding a performance art center. In her recent performance, eleven years later, Raban addressed Zakhem in the present tense, discussing the same questions about the new center inaugurated that evening.
August 2004
Kiss
Raban uses this performance to create a complex personal syntax. Random words from the dictionary, combined to create new meanings, are used to stimulate an intuitive experience. The result is a choreography pulling together various objects, body movements and sequences of trivial activities, in an attempt to gently expose the viewers’ latent experiences. A vulnerable paper dress is juxtaposed with photographs of the ruins of Beit Merkazim, in the aftermath of a fire that destroyed Performance Art Platform’s original location and most of Raban’s own works. In retrospect, the debris left by the fire is presented poetically, as fragments of memory hovering in the open space.
