Peaceful Be your return O lovely bird

2012

Peaceful be your return O lovely bird, from warm lands back to my window….
“The Zionist poet, Hayim Nachman Bialik, wrote these lines while studying at Yeshiva (Jewish theological Seminary)
in Europe, just before he abandoned it, and long before immigrating to Israel. In this poem, Bialik addresses an
imaginary bird that migrated from Palestine to his window; expressing his loneliness, the cold of exile and longing
to return to the Promised Land.
One hundred and twenty years passed, the Zionist bird of Bialik, like many other Zionist symbols, is robbed off
its meaning, like a signifier that lost its signified. Zionism gave way to nationalism and militarism and the radical
opponents from the Left defined this condition: Post-Zionism.
While exploring the fall of the Zionist dream (as in the sculptural installation Nimrod and Bird what do you sing,
somebody else sings from your throat), my sculptures ask to readdress that old vision. Presenting those empty
symbols in various positions may not be a notion of Post-Post-Zionism, but a way of looking at them with compassion
ten years after parting with them when I left my homeland, Israel, towards a wishful exile.”

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