Writer, Artist and Critic
HANA IVERSON at Eldridge Street Synagogue, New York
In an empty shaft whose long-collapsed stairs had once connected the synagogue's main floor and its women-only balcony, a 40-foot fall of white cloth was illuminated by a huge, projected video image of hands (the artist's) sewing parchment. A collage of voices - elderly and younger women, many with connections to the synagogue or its Lower East Side neighborhood - reminisced, sang and prayed, in an audio loop that played glancingly off the different-length video.
Iverson's video work has always been informed by strong body awareness, and use of the body as metaphor. Here, starting with a sense of the synagogue as body (a thought easily available to Christians), she concisely posited the shaft as wound, representing the rift between men and women congregants, and more generally, the historic exclusion of women from Jewish sacred process. The white cloth, visually rhyming the curtain that would have further separated the women's balcony in Orthodox synagogues such as Eldridge, in this new hypothesis became a bandage. This, along with the projected action of making stitches, suggested a binding and closing of the wound.
Parchment is, of course, skin, and this also carried several meanings: the traditional sewing-together of lengths of parchment to make Torah scrolls, opened the metaphor from doctoring a physical space to working on the living body of tradition. Such a rich symbolic engagement bears comparison with Helene Aylon's video installation The Liberation of G-D, with its repetitive highlighting of misogynist passages in the Old Testament. Where Aylon appropriated the Jewish men's prerogative of performing commentary, Iverson proceeded here from outside the liturgy--the excluded women's sphere, place of sewing and healing
The commanding, but ethereal video apparition in the stairwell reinforced the imaginal nature of Iverson's remedy. And it recalled similar ghostly summonings in the work of Shimon Attie--projections on walls and through water, in European cities that witnessed the loss of Jews and Jewish culture during the Holocaust. An expansion of her project to the web and European cities is planned; however it materializes, Iverson has already joined the company of artists like Aylon and Attie, and Christian Boltanski and Eleanor Antin, who use the languages of installation and multimedia to throw light on the layered complexities of their religious heritage.
--Miriam Seidel