Ruven, Shimon and Benjamin

Ruven and Shimon are my friend Shimon Lev and myself, Ora Ruven. And who is
Benjamin?

Ruven and Shimon represent two interlocutors with no specific identity. The only
specificity that does exist in this pair of Ruven-Shimon is that they are Jewish, Israeli.

My conversation with Shimon started like any other conversation between two
Israelis: we searched for mutual acquaintances, dug in the past, went all the way to our
ancestors and asked about the future of our children. Like any two other people here,
we spoke about ourselves, counted the dead and photographed the living.

Martin Buber says :

Here is Ruben as he would like to be seen by Simon, and Simon as he

would like to be seen by Ruben; Ruben as Simon really sees him, which is

usually not identical to Simon's desirable character and vice versa; Add to

that Ruben as he sees himself and Simon as he sees himself, and lastly the

physical Ruben and the physical Simon. Two living creatures and six fictional

characters, a real ghost-audience, are involved in the conversation between

the two.

Shimon Lev and I have our own ghost-audience engraved in our Buberian beings. We
brought to this exhibition the ghost-audience that wraps our ongoing dialog, ghosts
from the past and ghosts of the future.

Photographs of children today, shot mainly by parents equipped with constantly-

available digital accessories, supply immense amounts of visual material. The single
photograph – souvenir from the first day of school – does not exist anymore, but
rather an endless stock of photos. I search through the abundance of children’s
photos: playing, moving, alone or in groups, trying to capture body gestures which
seem primary: gestures of impulses and instincts which motivate us at any age,
dancing, violence, aggression, curiosity.

I imagine them in the difficult landscapes that await them, the same landscapes I
photograph on the road under the heavy weight of tradition. It is a hard thing to
imagine, so I looked for a way to produce these ghost-visions in order to distance them
from me, from here, from now and from you, who sees the works. Inspired by the
children’s photos, I drew with charcoal on paper and scanned the drawings. The scan
turned the charcoal grains into patches and lines, and the paper texture into woven
fabrics. I then hybridized the photos and the drawing using a digital pen, thus creating
a new image with equal traces of drawing and photography. The images were printed
on transparent Perspex to create more depth, a few more millimeters of distance.

Ora Ruven, 2012

Houses are not haunted. We are haunted, and regardless of the architecture with
which we surround ourselves, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.

DEAN KOONTZ, Velocity

Ruven and Shimon are the archetypes of a dialog between two characters, supposedly
imaginary, but at the same time present somewhere. Their names do not necessarily
refer to specific characters, yet they are personal characters.

Ora Ruven hints at the future and the fear of that future, while I, Shimon, hint at the
haunting past which walks with us. The conversations throughout the work on the
exhibition highlighted my intensive interest in the personal and family past, which was
already present in other exhibitions of mine.

In June 2012 I was invited for a residency on behalf of the Academy of Arts in Vienna,
for a special project dealing with the personal, national and rewritten past in Austria.
During my stay I conducted research in archives and photographed sites related to the
biography of my father, who was born in Vienna in 1922 and had to leave with his
family in 1934 to Berlin and on to their tragic future.

Dealing with memories, the (sometimes inseparable) national and family past and
searching roots are all forms of dealing with ghosts of the past, projecting on the
present, but also dictating the future.

_____

Shimon Lev, January 2013