Found on the program, "Tribal Fire" curated by Eyal Danon. Works in this selection offer a trek along an imaginary time-line that stretches between re-enacting and pre-enacting, between re-visiting and speculating. The artists allow us to visit past events through their re-enactments or speculate on future events by pre-enacting them. Presented at Estampa Art Fair, Madrid, 2008.
"…The question of origin and affinity is also present in Avi Mograbi’s work “Mrs. Goldstein.” The work is a sequence from the movie “August” (2002) in which Mograbi holds auditions for actresses for the role of Miryam Goldstein, the wife of the Jewish terrorist, Baruch Goldstein, who murdered Muslims in Hebron in 1994, during her testimony to the Shamgar committee that investigated the massacre.
In the work, actresses change in front of the camera but the testimony continues. Mograbi re-enacts the testimony by focusing on the text, the act of imitation of the scene itself is of less importance. The massacre of Baruch Goldstein is stamped in the collective memory as the first suicide event that led to the deterioration of the Oslo agreements into violence. The testimonies at the Shamger committee are not that well known and were not exposed that much to the public, thus, the re-enactment in the work is done in the shadow of the memory of the massacre as it was projected in the media and not of the testimony itself. The affinity of the re-enactment to the event is based on a general proximity that enables the contextualization of it. Mograbi, by a careful selection of specific parts of the testimony, gives a new and horrifying perspective of the massacre through the words of the wife of its perpetrator." (Eyal Danon)
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