Excerpts from:
Tami Katz-Freiman, "Bad Girls: The Israeli Version, Contemporary
Women Artists in Israel", to be published in: Melanie
Rich and Kalpana Misra (editors), Jewish Feminism
in Israel: Some Contemporary Perspectives, University
Press of New Engalnd, 2003
Hilla Lulu Lin: between body politics
and Middle Eastern politics
Another artist whose works incorporate both the personal and
the political is Hilla Lulu Lin. In Meta-Sex she presented
a video installation entitled No More Tears in a room with
yellow walls and a ceiling fan. A wrapped, coated heavy stone
was suspended from a hook in the most irritating location
in the room, threatening the viewer. The video documented
an endless journey of a yolk, that crawled slowly up the artist's
arms, climbed to her shoulder, entered her mouth, emitted
fully, reverted to rolling on the palm of her hand, and so
on and so forth. It was a never-ending loop of an auto-erotic
act, "anorectic acrobatics" – reception and
emission, between pleasure and strangulation which demanded
a kind of acrobatic skill so the yolk would not burst in her
mouth.
Through the act of nearly swallowing the yolk, Lin tried to
unravel the common affinities between woman-food-body, and
to take control over anything likely to penetrate. The choice
of a yolk/egg , an archetypal feminine-organic element, brings
to mind erotic cinematic scenes, exhibiting a similar use
of organic materials. The linkage between body and food also
corresponds with Janine Antoni’s chocolate and soap
castings and Jana Sterbak’s meat-dress works.
A different kind of association between food and existence
was manifest in Cold Blood (A Poem in Three Parts), a chilling
work produced by Lin in 1996, in the wake of Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination and prior to the ascent
of the right-wing Likud party. It consisted of three parts:
The Tel Aviv Seashore, based on a postcard image of Tel Aviv;
a manipulated image of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem;
and the artist’s eyes. The hedonistic character of Tel
Aviv’s seashore was juxtaposed with the sacredness of
the Dome of the Rock, the most sacred Muslim site in Jerusalem.
Both iconic landscapes were depicted under raw, bloody skies.
In-between these two scary images the artist planted a postcard-size
photograph: her own two eyes, blinding in their emptiness. |
