J'Accuse

2017, 6min, HD

Director, Camera, Edit by Alina Orlov

Statement

A short film, accompanied by an installation with glass works, embroidery, and steel sculpture. Émile Zola’s 1898 famous accusation is explored in a satirical and personal play on the origins of Zola’s phrase, where the character provides a stereotyped defense of the ‘jewish man’. The project was first exhibited as part of the artist’s three-months residency at YARAT, Baku, Azerbaijan – where both of the artist’s parents were born and raised. The film is accompanied by fetishistic objects, which characterize Baku: a reproduction of a metal skewer that belonged to the artist’s father, a round carpet made by local women weavers, embroidered with a repeated motif symbolizing a woman, and a decorative iron window bar, made originally in collaboration with a local metal worker. The project intersects an Israeli present, family memories and a local tradition, while tying together two singular “others” – the Women and the Jew. The object of desire is herself a desiring subject – for a Jewish groom or a powerless admonishment, injected into the Jewish context of the Soviet Union, blurring gender, ideological, religious and national power relations.