"The egg that arises from its ruins..."

Next week Aliza Olmert's exhibit of photographs, Tikkun, will go on display at the D.C. Jewish Community Center, in cooperation with the Embassy of Israel.



Tikkun, which means "repair,"in Hebrew, is often heard in combination with olam--the word for "world" or "universe."

The ancient concept of tikkun olam, "to repair the world," is that our responsibility as human beings is to make the world a better place. In deeper metaphysical terms, I think Jews have come to view this special mission with a tender irony: that it is also our job to love the world in its very brokenness.

Olmert would seem to agree. She rescued discarded eggshells from her neighborhood Jerusalem bakery and fitted them back together as best she could, pinning and splicing them to stand as they are, damaged and used, the fragile inner shell newly exposed to light. Olmert photographed the results and enhanced the images on computer to render “the delicate and rather small original constructions [into] 'larger than life' photographs...new compositions based on the constructions, not pictures of them.”

So in a sense, the medium itself (photography) is also broken, and thereby follows the message.

Other media for Olmert include banners, car parts, recycled video images, and newspaper.

“My focus is ecological,” she says. “The recycling/revival of the wasted/ unneeded/ already used; the acknowledged beauty of the marginal and damaged; an attempt to prolong the duration/to treasure the ready to be thrown away; a reminder of the forgotten/ taken-for-granted wonders of life. Attaching value to the worthless. Appreciating the individual form that every destruction creates, (contrary to the similarity between not yet broken shells).”

“…the egg that arises from its ruins,” writes Hanna Koffler in the exhibit catalogue, “[is] less perfect, but more full, more open (because it is broken), broader (because it is spread open), freer (because it is open to the winds), more fascinating in its being liberated from its expected and banal pattern of existence.”

Opening on the fortuitous September 18 (that's the 14th of Elul to some of us), and up through January 2006 at the D.C. JCC, 1529 16th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036.

I can't resist an important link to someone close to me who is enacting tikkun olam in his life daily, with the supportand much-needed levitational humor of his awesome wife.

categories: art religion thought