WORKS

Two photographs show the words ‘HOT’ and ‘COLD’ impressed on two sheets of pigskin: ‘HOT’, was stamped with hot-iron branding, while ‘COLD’ was stamped with freeze branding, a process involving dry ice and alcohol that cause the skin to lose its pigmentation. The processes are commonly used to mark cattle with ID numbers. In the photos, the numbers are substituted by the lexical opposites of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, pointing to the two extremes of these painful processes, both of which depend on the wounding and permanent scaring of a living being. “Fire and Ice” is named after the eponymous poem by Robert Frost, where two types of apocalypses – through fire or ice – are compared along the opposing emotions of desire and hate. The title aptly relates to a work in which Mor continues to address the complex relations we have with animals, especially in the modern industrialized world.

A pair of still photographs untitled (2014–2015) brings the faded portraits of two international movie stars, Sophia Loren and Arnold Schwarzenegger, albeit in an advanced state of decay. The portraits are photographed from the front covers of old entertainment magazines that Mor found in factories across the country, either deserted or in the process of dissolution, still adorning their gloomy walls. These images of faded Hollywood glamour were isolated from their surrounding, yet the signs of time and decay are clearly visible in them, suggesting illness and accelerated aging. In their present state, these discolored images embody the false promises and deceptive beauty of the capitalist dream machine. From the text “under the skin”, Sally Haftel Naveh.

The series Personal Objects (2015) shows the contents of personal lockers in a communist-era factory where the workers store their humble belongings. The lockers were broken open as it were to exhibit their modest and functional contents of dishes, heaters and work tools. Like some x-ray image that penetrates beyond the “iron curtain,” the image exposes a generic existence and objects of indistinctive, impersonal character – except perhaps a miniature portrait of the country’s former dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu. This is a display of poverty and dereliction, of both an emotional and physical decay. From the text “under the skin”, Sally Haftel Naveh.

Three portraits titled Nursing, Feeding and Play (2014) make up the series, Under the Skin. On first impression, they seem to belong to a tradition of idyllic country life: a woman, a man and a child each pose against the lush backdrop of gorgeous countryside views, mountains and prairies. Posing in traditional festive costumes, in each portrait the subject interacts with the flayed body of a dead animal. The woman nurses a lamb in her arms in a maternal gesture; the man is seated on a tree trunk with a dead pigeon laid beside him; and the child lovingly carries a rabbit. The meticulous staging of these highly aestheticized portraits verges on the saccharine, with overtones of nation and tradition giving way to an ironic and ambivalent look at the antithetic values of life and death. From the text “under the skin”, Sally Haftel Naveh.

Three portraits titled Nursing, Feeding and Play (2014) make up the series, Under the Skin. On first impression, they seem to belong to a tradition of idyllic country life: a woman, a man and a child each pose against the lush backdrop of gorgeous countryside views, mountains and prairies. Posing in traditional festive costumes, in each portrait the subject interacts with the flayed body of a dead animal. The woman nurses a lamb in her arms in a maternal gesture; the man is seated on a tree trunk with a dead pigeon laid beside him; and the child lovingly carries a rabbit. The meticulous staging of these highly aestheticized portraits verges on the saccharine, with overtones of nation and tradition giving way to an ironic and ambivalent look at the antithetic values of life and death. From the text “under the skin”, Sally Haftel Naveh.

Mor’s series of photographs “Monuments of Remembrance” and “Cellars of the Soul” (2011-2012) are based on her desire to capture the nature of a disappearing world, in this case of archives in one of Romania’s national institutions. This country has undergone far-reaching changes since the fall of the communist Iron Curtain following the execution of President Nicolae Ceausescu in late December 1989, and up to its present position as a democratic state and member of the European Union. But Romania’s liberation and the opening of its geographical frontiers for the benefit of joining the global world serve only as a background for Mor’s work. She is more interested in the places preserved as ascetic hegemonies of knowledge into which ordinary people were denied entry, and which in many respects preserve a zeitgeist whose impressions are seemingly vanishing. Her photographs impart a sense of obstruction, suffocation, and putrefaction that raises questions on their role as symbols of time and place, but also on their implicit covert strategies. What is the importance of the knowledge that over the years has piled up in these places? What is the relevance of its present use? And is the manifestation created by any entity holding coded material cloaked in confidentiality and secrecy more important than the material itself? … At the same time the artist qualifies conversion of the remnants into sacred relics, and does not cling to the blindness of a nostalgic gaze, which is usually added to photographs documenting something that existed and has disappeared, but she formulates a position that raises essential questions on the benefits of accumulating and preserving mountains of information. Are obsessive past and present documentation and according retrospective value to every written scrap of paper indeed necessary, or are they a tool for rewriting and distorting history? Are the various archives intended for the storage of information and making it available to society in general, or for burying and concealing it while creating a hierarchy of authorized accessibility to it, as opposed to those excluded from it? Does stuffing the past into orderly drawers not abet its exclusion from the contemporary narrative being formulated? The viewers of Mor’s photographs seemingly stand before a monumental tightlipped sphinx. All the locked drawers, the bound file folders, the accumulated data and the mountains of information are austere and undecipherable. More than they expose themselves to the observer they place question marks before him, and wonderment regarding the symbolism of their present role as a historical strongbox, an echo of different times when the hidden was greater than the revealed. From the Catalogue “Remembering in order to forget”, curator: Sagi Refael

The photographs in this series were created in a historical institution and document the core of the cellars of remembrance imprisoned there, a moment before the arrival of the real estate development bulldozers. The photographs impart a sense of obstruction, suffocation, and putrefaction that raises questions on their role as symbols of time and place. What is the importance of the knowledge that over the years has piled up in these places, and what is the relevance of its present use? The disintegrating book, the peeling walls, and the overall neglect are depicted as painful memories, as physical wounds that with time seem to have healed, and that delving into them for information is like peeling away something that would, perhaps, be better left behind. Is there justification in preserving these scraps of the past as closed historical evidence? Do they hold materials vital for our contemporary life, or will their release be like opening a Pandora’s Box that will free demons that cannot be repressed?