Last update - 00:00 07/09/2006
A swindler's long road home
This week, dozens of A4-sized photographs lay on the floor of Tel Aviv's Gordon Gallery waiting to be hung: metallic mailboxes with name stickers, a tree backed by Lake Kinneret, a tractor plowing a field, the outline of a headless, naked girl carved into the trunk of a eucalyptus tree and an air-conditioner with the word "Kinneret" written on it in white.
These seemingly random photographs were taken at Kibbutz Kinneret and exhibited last month at Beit Gabriel, on the Kinneret shore, as part of a show by Michal Na'aman entitled "Miracles on the Water." The exhibit moved this week to the Gordon Gallery, where it will be until Tuesday.
The exhibit was Na'aman's excuse to return, after nearly 30 years, to the kibbutz where she was born and raised.
Na'aman had not been invited to participate in the "My Kinneret" series of exhibitions initiated by curator Gideon Ophrat at Beit Gabriel. When she heard about the series she called Ophrat and asked to participate, but the list of artists was already closed.
"I terribly wanted to show there," she says. "It was clear to me that if there were an exhibition, I would go back to the kibbutz to see what has changed and what has remained. I knew that if I worked on this exhibition, I would finally dare to enter the kibbutz. And really, only then did I manage to pass through the gate."
The exhibition and the camera - which played the mediating role - allowed Na'aman to go back to the place she and her family had left when she was 14 years old.
"I didn't know whether they knew me or didn't know me, and this was terribly strange," she says about the day she entered the kibbutz with a camera. "I went in there and I knew exactly where everything was. I gathered pieces of a place: the mailboxes with the familiar names, the work roster, the house where we lived, which is called 'the northern house.' This house was unusual for kibbutz construction. It was three stories high, and we lived on the top floor. I photographed all these places.
"The strangest thing was that when I walked around the kibbutz, I didn't meet a living soul. The next day I went to Yardenit, a baptismal site for Christian pilgrims and one of my favorite places around the Kinneret. At the main ticket counter I met someone who was in my class, Orit, who said to me, "Howdy, Michal. I heard you were at Kinneret yesterday."
And what did you feel when you were there?
"Things were exactly as I remembered them. It was like a dream. I've often dreamed I was there. Dreams with a fragrance of longing."
Nevertheless, did you see anything new?
"That on all the air conditioners the word 'Kinneret' is engraved, which indicates kibbutz property."
And what in fact was the aim of capturing these pieces?
"To connect to the place somehow. To spin spider webs, the way Nasrallah said, to find something that connects."
'No. Yes, yes, yes'
Two things were clear to Na'aman as she worked on the exhibition: She was going back to the kibbutz in order to photograph places she remembered from her childhood, and that as part of the exhibition, she would place a sign on the Kinneret shore with the inscription, "The eye of the country." In placing the sign, reminiscent of the legendary "The eyes of the country" sign Na'aman placed on the Tel Aviv beach at the end of the 1970s, she found herself in a rather chilling coincidence. "The eyes of the country" was placed in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, while the new sign became, inevitably, almost prophetic. Na'aman, too, was spooked by the coincidence.
"Clearly that thought was megalomaniacal and missed the point," she says, "but it did burn me. This exhibition was a 'non-event' that suddenly found itself in the war. On Saturday morning there was a small opening with my family, my caregivers from the kibbutz and the curator, Gideon Ophrat, and four days later the abduction happened. There's a Steven Spielberg film, 'Empire of the Sun,' about the war in Japan. At the beginning of the film you see a child playing with a lantern and boom, the war starts. He is certain he started it, that everything happened because of him. I didn't cause the war to break out, but the coincidence created a strange feeling. The whole area was more or less boiling over. And that was it, no one came."
One person who did come was Amon Yariv from the Gordon Gallery who, like Na'aman, felt it would be a great pity if no one saw the exhibition. Though it was intended primarily for people from the north, as Yariv says: "This is a wonderful exhibition, and I felt it was important to expose it to as many people as possible."
Yariv proposed to Na'aman that she show it for a week in Tel Aviv. At first she responded with "No," and then "Yes, yes, yes."
"This is an exhibition I never would have prepared for a space in Tel Aviv," she says.
Those who are familiar with her works, whose most outstanding features are mystery and encryption, can understand her initial reservations. Beyond the fact that the audience in Tel Aviv is completely different, there is also a strong dimension of exposure in the exhibition. This is an intimate exhibition, lacking the concealment that characterizes her work.
The Swindler family
The collection of photographs, a kind of archive of private and collective memories, encoded and direct, affords a look into what is behind the layers of masking tape that cover her works. It appears Na'aman is revealing for the first time the bed of soil from which her words, images, thoughts and metaphors grow. This offers insight into her "coded" works, as Yariv defined it.
The display of her biographical, direct photographs alongside her colorful and stunning paintings intensifies the drama and creates an additional stratum. This collection also includes photographs and images connected to her father, Professor Shlomo Na'aman, who was an educator at the regional school in the Jordan Valley and played a role in his family's departure from the kibbutz.
In the text that accompanies the exhibition, which has also been published online, Ophrat writes: "It was no small matter to grow up in the 1950s on Kibbutz Kinneret as the daughter of two teachers - parents who did not fulfill the philosophy of the earth - never mind the distress of the nickname common in the area communities at the time: 'My father, Shlomo, was known in the valley by the name Gazlan (Swindler). My family was called the Swindlers. I wondered whether to call the exhibition "The Eye of the Country" - after the sign I put up on the Kinneret shore - or "The Swindlers",'" he quotes Na'aman.
In the text, Ophrat indirectly linked the fact that Na'aman's parents did not cultivate the land - a stigma in kibbutz society - and the nickname. But one online reader, Gabi Pinsky, explained this in a different way: "Shlomo Na'aman was a teacher admired by his students. We respected him and his personality, and the word 'swindler' stuck to him because he would shorten our recesses. All this was explicitly a swindle of recess time and no more. It's a grave word, but it has no other significance."
Na'aman remembers Pinsky and confirms the origin of the nickname, but nevertheless she reiterates that it made her life and that of her family difficult, to say the least. Though in the end she decided not to call the exhibition "The Swindlers," she did write the name in large letters on one of the works.
"When they wanted to annoy me they called me that," she says. "Altogether, one of my problems with returning to Kinneret was this, and the way my family was perceived as a family of intellectuals. I remember once, when I was 12, I was working packing dates at the kibbutz. We had to fill sacks of 100 grams, and mine were too heavy. One of the people came up to me and showed me how I was supposed to work. If there is a date of five grams and a date of four grams then you choose the one that is four grams. In the end I burst out crying and he shouted after me, 'Intellectuals' daughter, learn to work.'"