Makom-Al-Makom_catalog-new

E20 There is no escaping the connotation of mass burial in Grund , which recalls the mass killings of Jews in the forests of Nazi–occupied Europe. Beyond the memory of trauma, though, the installation centrally evokes a loss of purchase on the ground. Over and above its unmissable reference to the Shoah, and the title's ambiguous reference to reason and reasoning, the installation's uprooted and floating ground resonates with profound existential incertitude. Ullman's work in Kassel, which is close to the town from which his family were traumatically displaced, evinces a persistent migratory apprehension. Some of Ullman's later installations spatialize existential transience on a scale suited to gallery exhibition. In Sanday , performed in 1997, the artist moved the contents of his home into an art gallery in Tel Aviv. The Hebrew title, Yom Hol , is a play on the double meaning of "weekday" and "sand day." Spraying thinly-sieved red soil over the objects before removing them carefully, he created an ephemeral sand map of his family home. A similar gesture can be found in the site-specific installation Wedding (figure 11, see p. 18), which featured centrally in the artist's exhibition Sands of Time (2011) at the Israel Museum. A performative "wedding," the installation entailed the exhibition curators and volunteers acting out a Jewish matrimonial ceremony. The artist sprayed a thin shower of hamra soil over the entire scene, participants included. Ullman defined his own part as that of a "photographer," recording in sand the imprint of a cryptic event that seemed to have been disrupted, perhaps violently. Finally, in the installation Semi-Detached (2018; figure 12) Ullman returned to the trope of the home, tracing the floor plans of his family residence and the adjacent neighbors' semi- detached home in thin berms of red hamra. Re-scaling the house to fit the gallery space, the artist included contours of home amenities, such as showers, wash basins, and bathrooms, among which visitors were invited to meander. The extreme fragility of the installation required weekly maintenance, which the artist undertook himself with thehelpof assistants, restoring ledges damaged by visitors walking inside the transitory home. Sanday , Wedding , and Semi-Detached are fragile memory maps, investing the very notion of presence with the haunting shadow of impermanence. Figure 12: Micha Ullman, Semidetached , 2018 Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art Red sand, 6X1470X2000 cm. Photo: Avraham Hay Earth installation, presented at Scene of Events exhibition, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018