“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.
