Ghiora Aharoni – Selected Works for The Pomegranate Award Installation
Ghiora Aharoni, a world-renowned Israeli-born Yemenite artist and designer, will be receiving the 1st ASF “Pomegranate Award for Art, Design, and Architecture” at Opening Night of the 25th NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival on 8 May. Through his work, Aharoni challenges social norms and explores dualities, such as the intersection of religion and science, and relationships between disparate cultures. His pieces are held in remarkable collections worldwide, including The Pompidou Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Vatican. The NYSJFF will be blessed with a exclusive, limited installation of Aharoni’s work! Don’t miss it!
The Genesis Series—an on-going series of assemblage sculptures—explores the notion of humankind’s creation as something that is multifaceted and collective, and a narrative that is both fluid and symbiotic. The series is a meditation on humanity’s interconnected and dynamic relationship with creation that blurs our notions of linear time and linear thought. Using iconography and text that metaphorically reference scientific, spiritual and cultural beliefs, each sculpture is a self-contained universe where these expressions of the creation narrative symbolically engage in a dialogue. The sculptures are unified by the presence of light, which symbolizes both the rational light of scientific truth as well as divine illumination.
Employing the Genesis text from the Torah as well as text from the prologue of the Zohar as a point of departure, the sculptures engage the notion of creation as a dynamic process that straddles the realms of fact and faith—and reaches beyond the parameters of time and cultures.
The Genesis Series Day VII is composed of recontexualized objects from across the spectrum of time, that are inscribed with a prior existence, including laboratory beakers, flasks and tubes from as early as the 1940s—symbols of the empirical world—which are engraved and imprinted with text from the Enuma Elish in Cuneiform, the Book of Genesis in Hebrew and from the Zohar in Aramaic. The juxtaposition of elements—from scientific apparatus as well as icons and text from different belief systems—invites the viewer to consider the ways in which these various narratives of beginnings coalesce, intersect and overlap.
Let Me Hear Your Voice and One Who Longs for Knowledge and Wisdom
Vintage Yemenite women’s headdresses, called gargush (two of which will be exhibited), and a single cone-shaped Yemenite Jewish wedding headdress, called tashbuk—have been embellished and recontextualized by Aharoni as sculptures. These traditional symbols of modesty, prescribed for women to cover their hair as an act of modesty, are transformed into a lens through which the viewer is asked to contemplate gender-based prohibitions.
One Who Longs for Knowledge and Wisdom (The Gargush Series), takes its title from a poem by Shalom Shabazi (1619-c. 1720), the celebrated Jewish Yemenite poet. The headdresses are embellished on the exteriors with traditional Yemenite silver jewelry and ornamentation, and on the interiors with a satin lining embroidered in Hebrabic© (the artist’s combination of Hebrew and Arabic) with a verse by Shalom Shabazi:
“One who longs for knowledge and wisdom, go to Sana’a, for there you will find a wellspring of happiness. Therein are the wise capable of answering your every question.”
The two gargush create a metaphorical voice for women, which venerates the second work: a tashbuk embellished by Aharoni with traditional Yemenite silver jewelry, ornamentation and silk flowers; an interior satin lining embroidered with the Shabazi poem in Hebrabic©; and a satin veil, created by Aharoni, which is embroidered in Judeo-Arabic with four traditional Yemenite women’s songs of love and longing.
This inspiring visual chorus of women’s voices—appropriating the Shabazi poem as a song of their own—is a direct rebuttal to a peripheral Jewish edict related to modesty, which says that women’s voices should not be heard, because they are too seductive. With this installation, Aharoni presents an alternative perspective, one of equality where women’s voices are celebrated rather than suppressed…and its title, Let Me Hear Your Voice (Tashbuk), comes from The Song of Solomon, where the bridegroom entreats his bride for her voice.
By embellishing the traditional gargush and tashbuk, Aharoni amplifies the inherent energy of the traditional headdresses—elevating their status as feminine iconography—and employs text as an additional layer of narrative. While these interventions invite the viewer to contemplate the status of women via a seemingly specific lens of time and culture, the question it asks ultimately transcends both.