Reviving

Noga Or-Yam’s final project during her master’s studies at Bezalel was the starting point for her current work. At its center is an audio work based on an ongoing dialogue between her and her father—a Holocaust survivor and renowned yoga guru. He attracted many students, and in the 1980s established a Tantric Yoga ashram, where Or-Yam was born. The multilayered sound heard inside the tent structure is based on snippets from an intimate dialogue between father and daughter, who together take apart memories of the past and create new ones. The recordings sway between the sacred and the mundane — moments of study, small talk and silences. The transition between them becomes an act of roaming through the elusive memory of a dream, which appears and disappears repeatedly.

The work takes place in a non-linear time around Or-Yam’s gradual parting from her father, who is in the ninth decade of his life. The older he gets, the more the conversations with him are suffused with an enquiry about life, death, and its aftermath. The worldview that emerges sees death as a mere stop along the soul’s path, rather than an absolute end. This raises the question of when does the spiritual path serve as a source of comfort and meaning, and when is it a means of diverting one’s gaze to avoid facing reality.

While the tent is often seen as a temporary structure that provides shelter to passing travelers in the desert, here it refers to a recurring dream that Or-Yam recounts to her father, based on a shared biographical memory which is read anew: a stormy sea where a tent is carried away by the wind, utterly at its mercy. Inside the museum it assumes a real form as an intimate space that invites visitors to be present in the moment.