Loushy | Project details

Zivia Kay Text | Tekes | Textile

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Written by Meir Loushy

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Text | Tekes* | Textile
*(Hebrew: Ritual, rite, ceremony)

In her project/solo exhibition Text | Tekes | Textile, Zivia Kay uses textile contrivances to impart meaning to social culture. Textile works are texts for thought about a ritual designed to examine and unravel the social conventions that separate death from life. A thread passing through each work connects material and thought, woven in a ritual object. The ritual is thus ordained, calling for elimination of the cultural conditioning that demands the delineation of separation lines. In any culture, text, language and word exist as a system of conventional, unambiguous symbols whose purpose is to minimize gray areas. By contrast, Kay’s textile works are an abstract text whose plot is woven with intuitive, material writing.
Kay creates shrouds that represent living materials, designed to be present as an everyday object. The shrouds establish a ceremony that connects the earthly and bodily with the immortal, infinite and incomprehensible. Each shroud is personal and has a specific essence coded within it, a talisman for life. Its presence alongside life erodes perception of the boundary between the next stage and the path that leads to it. Two of the shrouds are intended for living persons and two will no longer be needed.
The shroud for Lao Tzu is situated on a section of a path-road. Its front could also be its back and vice versa. Twigs are woven among the layers of silk, one opposite the other as though reflected in a mirror. Their duality renders the medium between them superfluous and intensifies the meaning of passage along an infinite path.
The remaining shrouds are rolled up like parchments. With her shroud for Hannah Arendt, Kay reflects the complexity between Arendt as a woman functioning in this world and Arendt as a researcher of basic meanings in human consciousness. The text(ile) that represents Arendt in her own four cubits is tightly closed up at the back so that nothing may enter. The front bears a textile representing the social thought of Arendt the philosopher, gathered under a crown—whose shape recalls a fleur de lis—that accords it existential validity.
Kay’s own shroud rests on a painting of tigers, facing Shroud no. 1 “for the man I love”, mapping the overflow of intimate items in the color of the space between them.
Glass lenses are a ritual tool, in the center of which are holes whose plastic power can even overcome the glass’s transparency, enabling one to convert the Tekes while gazing at the text of the textile.

Meir Loushy, November 2018

Tigers painting: Topaz Sharon
Glass assitants: Adam Salvi and Olya Brener

This exhibit is supported by Raanan and Nicole Agus
as part of the Judaica Faculty Research Project at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusale