The (non) Domestic Poem

Morag presents us with three movements, three pulsations of life: the first appears to be a black, burnt house. The mineral layer of existence – literally for Morag, who is a second-generation Holocaust survivor – is burnt unto the black cloth, unto the doors that lead to nothingness. This is the constantly, incessantly pulsating dark core. The vocal work, based on a text by Alain Robbe-Grillet, which is disassembled and then reassembled, endows the space with a transcendent, religious, yet harrowing air.

The second movement seeks to formalize the present: the long work is based on a journalistic photograph by Shaul Golan, portraying an Israeli soldier setting up a position in the home kitchen of an Arab family.

The third movement purportedly spreads a protective canopy of objects over both the past and the present. Meticulous, professional, impeccable paintings depict daily objects, appearing aloof with their clarity of texture and aesthetic mien.

This is a song of praise for the staging of the bourgeois home, it would seem. But a sense of annihilation breaks through every polished pigment, oozing from the obsessive documentation. Morag talks about the objects that serve as anchor and support in the attempt to come to terms with estrangement and persecutory anxiety; overbearing feelings compressed and embedded into the glossy materiality. Another Ahraon Shabtai poem is hiding underneath this (non) domestic poem: “Shit, Death.”