Fatherland: heaven | Exhibition in the 23rd Nidbach Series

A line goes out from me to Poland, from my father to Poland, from me to my father, and not from my father to me; in this space I present years of longing, of searching and not searching. I conclude the long period of mourning for my father.

– Mina Reingold

In her first solo exhibition, Mina Reingold strives to come to terms with the place and the objects/bodies that surrounded her father, whose body is no longer. She points to Poland, her father’s homeland, as a geographical and cultural umbrella space that centralizes all those bodies. There she imagines her father living amidst things, and while he is absent, the objects are present, and she revisits them, striving to give account and make their acquaintance. The distance is necessary. It enables the separateness and the gaze outward. Reingold observes a culture not her own, studies the logic of the place, and gathers information with her body and her imagination through a prolonged process of compliance with and denial of the duty to know and make known.

She melts together the scraps of information she gathered—bits mixed with fragments of memories and feelings—to create a near ritualistic sculptural space of interpersonal monuments; two spaces observing one another. The gaze at the other space reveals the distance, the chasms of time, and the temperature, as well as the power of the imagination to overcome all of these and put forth an indirect, exegetic, informative work, in which the artist is inseparable from the source. Reingold spaces the historical reality out, introducing fragments of another time therein to create a place where new things may grow.

Fatherland, as opposed to homeland, indicates not only one’s place of birth, but also refers to the family and cultural history which shaped one’s national and ethnic identity. Paradise is a site and a state of mind, access to which is in doubt. Juxtaposing them, she regards the fatherland as heaven, a paradise.

Shahar Yahalom