On Birds and Humans, Captivity and Elusions | Edith Fischer Katz
Curator: Sofie Berzon MacKie
Opening: 7.2.25, Friday, 11:00
Artist Talk: 28.2.25 Friday, 11:00
Closing: 22.3.25
A small city has sprouted from the floor. Plexiglass structures are stacked and transformed into delicate tissue. Inside them are human figures of various sizes dressed in underwear, a lexicon of what it is possible to be as a human being. They are engaged in actions guided by a hidden logic. It seems that a latent impulse drives them to live within their tiny space, following daily activities that are partially understood. And, as in any city, our companions – the sparrows – are everywhere. We belong to this city and remain strangers to it. The connecting thread we will weave within ourselves, for these figures are much like us, only smaller. The books and sparrows, however, remain at a scale that is convenient for us.
**
Various non-fiction and philosophical books are scattered throughout the small city. In some places, stabilizing it. ‘The Story of Human Birth’ by Dr. Alan Frank Guttmacher, ‘Hebrew Villages’, ‘The Naked Ape’ by zoologist Desmond Morris, ‘Pregnancy, Birth and the Newborn Baby’ (1979), ‘People and Places’ by cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. We hold 4,000 years of written materials – stories, patterns, and ideas that organize and explain the world – a kaleidoscope of great human enterprise that anchors our place in the Great Infinity.
Some of the books have grown thorns. On others, birds gather, hatch, and die. Thorns and birds were once intertwined in an ancient Celtic legend of the thornbird, a mythical bird that spends its entire life searching for an acacia tree. When it finds one, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest thorn that grows from its prickly branches, singing the most beautiful song ever heard as it dies, silencing the country in reverence. In another version, a goldfinch pulls a thorn from Jesus’ crown, his blood staining its feathers red.
**
The sparrow is the canary in the coal mine for humanity’s collective consciousness. The presence of small, delicate songbirds signals the vitality of our fabric of life. Sparrows are synanthropic birds[1] – animals living alongside us, evolving as partners. Their presence is so supportive and comforting that we have named them the House Sparrow. They are a tender reminder of our belonging to a pulsating fabric that transcends us. A warm and humble daily encounter, with the parallel happenings that are sizzling around us at all times. The obscure order that continues to move the world has not been damaged; it is we who are failing and hurting within it.
During our visit to Kibbutz Be’eri’s library, while it still stood intact, the artist retrieved Mind from Life Science Library out of a massive pile of books removed from the library, in one of the periodic screenings we conduct in our heritage and knowledge warehouse. Between dusty, neatly cataloged volumes, the years push most types of books into the dustbin of the history of ideas. Time will pile up in a torn cardboard box, even what we experience today as truth. At the time, it was merely a disturbing thought, replaced by what happened not long after, when the curtain covering reality was abruptly unveiled, and a dazzling light revealed contours of flickering transparent bars. Whether by external force or some innate trait, sometimes things seem clear in their entirety, and you can no longer know anything.
**
Gaping holes in the library walls – perfectly sized for sparrows that now nest within them, sheltered by pink oleander bushes. Soon, a generation of birds will grow up, never remembering how the holes came to be.
**
A sparrow is tied to psychologist B.F. Skinner’s ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity.’ Taken directly from ‘The Goldfinch,’[2] a painting by Fabritius, the little sparrow negotiates freedom. In the struggle for the human soul, the knowledge striving for liberation from the suffering of alienation and existential solitude – from the terror of chaos – becomes captivity. The sky, too, is a reflection in the deceptive glass that shatters against it, and the meaning of severing the delicate rope now tied to our leg, the one binding us to an imperfect world, remains unanswered.
[1] Synanthrope: A human companion. Animals or plants that live close to humans and enjoy their existence and the artificial habitats that people create around themselves.
[2] The Goldfinch, 24*34, Carl Fabritius (1622-1654). Fabritius was killed in the Delft Thunderclap on October 12, 1652, when a warehouse full of gunpowder exploded. 1200 men and women were killed in the disaster, and a quarter of the town’s houses were destroyed, along with the artist’s house and studio.
