Eve

Curator: Bar Yerushalmi

2022

In her solo show, Liat Danieli produces a dwelling place for women and bees together. We are all invited to share the gallery space, which she re-imagines as a human hive-womb: a gathering space within which we are invited to nourish and be nourished; a place of attention to the constant buzzing of live bees, transmitted from a swarm hive located at the back of the gallery building.

The show’s main axis was an ongoing bi-weekly event, in which Danieli performs an act of collecting visitors’ memories of feeding and breastfeeding. She uses her own breast milk to write these memories on paper napkins, which she irons and preserves as evidence of the unwritten contract between a mother and her child and the reciprocal relations inherent to this elementary bond.

Moreover, the gallery functioned throughout the show as a safe space for women to breastfeed. It also hosted activities connected to breastfeeding and its complexity performed by humanitarian and community organizations: breastfeeding training for nursing mothers, breast milk donation to the National Human Milk Bank (an organization run by the MDA, inviting women to donate breast milk for premature babies), and lectures by environmental organizations aimed at raising awareness to the importance of bees and their protection.

The title of the show, Eve, refers to an ancestral guardian protecting the nursing mother and her child, as well as the artistic act. It also functions as a renewed call for a collective female identity, for a return to the primordial breasts and the primal fountain that nurses all of us. It invites a movement back to the mythical mother of all mothers, and the life substance she bestows: milk and honey, dripping and mingling, blessing and nourishing all creatures of creation.