Talya Kutz Shamir / Threading the Absence

In the works on view, artist and art therapist Talya Kutz Shamir reanimates the act of embroidery as a gesture of repair in the face of destruction and disaster. In October 2023, Kutz Shamir lost her brother, his wife, and their three children, residents of Kibbutz Kfar Aza. More than an artistic medium, embroidery, for her, is an act of reaching inward, into the abyss, in an attempt to touch its form and materiality.
The works trace a painful timeline between October 1973 and October 2023, extending into the present. The ground for the embroidery is a charged readymade: an army shirt, a tablecloth, and pillowcases left in the destroyed family home. On these textiles, which carry the memory of the body and the home, Kutz Shamir embroiders images that range from the figurative to the symbolic. Embroidered on an inverted army shirt, the figure of the artist’s niece Rotem gazes at us from a field of anemones in a desperate attempt to revive an intergenerational bond violently severed.
The exhibition is centered on the tension between the world before and after. The mud, tar, and black craters, gaped in the fabrics, infiltrate the idyllic white and green; but even within the encroaching blackness, Kutz Shamir offers a thread of grace: the stork accompanying the hovering souls holds a white thread in its beak. Beyond stitching the fabric, the thread seeks to mend the torn pieces of soul and memory before they are lost forever.