Against Forgetting: Niza Brezniak and Yotam Sivan
 
Maya Folman

The big plant is yellowing, shedding its leafs one by one
Alas! A slow death
I loved the plant
More than a piece of furniture, a plant is a living thing.
 
-          Niza Brezniak. Nov. 14, 1975

 
 
The work of Niza Brezniak (1949-1979) deals with inner decay of her body and her life. At the tender age of 14, she was diagnosed with autoimmune disease of unknown source. For more than half of her life, she had conducted an adamant, albeit hopeless, struggle against a predetermined fate. In ferocious contrast to what was happening inside her, her outward appearance did not betray even the slightest hint of the incurable disease that was devouring her. As if simulating her inner deterioration, she used art to undermine her intact outward appearance, attacking her own body directly and uncompromisingly time and again.
Niza Brezniak's oeuvre on display in this exhibition demonstrates variegated techniques, including large scale acrylic paintings, splashes of color and collages, photographs as well as documentation of audience-less performances. Distorted, unsightly women repeatedly feature in her paintings, and among them Brezniak's face looms with its fragile heart rending beauty, which is clearly evident despite all her efforts to trample and mutilate it. The deconstruction of the painterly narrative into conflicted stretches of color, embedded with paper cuttings and photographs, echoes her inner decomposition and her body's want of matter. Rather than merely a central object of her works, the perishable body is also a substance that, willy-nilly, is exposed to experimentation offering direct and keen gaze at the awful truth of her transient existence. Even though Brezniak lived and created in Eilat, outside of Israel's art and culture hub, her late work can be associated with the tradition of body work of women artists who stretched the boundaries of the body and the self during the 1970s both here and elsewhere in the world.
Together with Brezniak's works, the exhibition features Niza, a work by the artist's nephew, Yotam Sivan (b. 1990). As a young adult, Yotam Sivan gradually familiarized himself with his aunt by looking at her works which adorn his parents' and grandparents' homes. In his work, he created a whistling silicon mechanism in the shape of his mouth, the sound of which pierces the opaque silence that transcended on the family's home following his aunt's death. The whistling sound is created by inhalation through tightly contracted lips, like a body breathing in the living wind blowing through the display space and threatening to swallow up also the viewers into nonexistence. Similarly to the long-standing communicative function of a whistle, the delicate thread span by Sivan's whistle in the air of the exhibition connects the existent and the nonexistent, the material presence of his mouth and the spirit of Niza Brezniak, until they are mutually absorbed, merged together. His whistle invokes her spirit, brings her and her work back to life. However, it seems that precisely at the very moment of her rebirth, her absence is felt all the more forcefully and painfully.

יישאו דברים: - פרופ' רבקה כרמי, נשיאת אוניברסיטת בן-גוריון בנגב - פרופ' נירית בן אריה דבי- ראש המחלקה לאומנות, אוניברסיטת בן גוריון - אלן גינתון- אוצרת בכירה לאמנות ישראלית, מוזיאון תל אביב ומרצה בקורס אוצרות רעיונית ומעשית - דר' נפתלי ברזניאק- מומחה ליישור שיניים וסופר מופע אמנותי "גוף:נשק" - עבודת מחול המשלבת אנימציה וסאונד. מאת ובביצוע R.A.Z