Miri Nishri: Is this Baby Yours? A must see
300 women and men got a wooden box from Miri Nishri containing a painting of an embryo accompanied by the question: “Is this baby yours?”. Miri Nishri is presenting the boxes and the responses she received at the Kibbutz Gallery in Tel Aviv, as an installation of mail-art. Nishri’s exhibition style is poor and plucked (consciously, intentionally), and the gallery walls look more like the halls of a school building: boxes, notes, sketches, written responses, painted responses and one video response, excellent in every way, by Avi Mugrabi, who denies any relation to the baby. Categorically speaking it is “conceptual art”. And so we see that conceptual art is not dead in Israel. We’re in luck. Humanly speaking, this is one of the most human (in the sense of dealing with questions of humanity) and best exhibitions presented here for years. Miri Nishri, through her passive, scarlet painted embryo, invades, both mentally and physically the conscious, physical, moral and private realms of each of her addressees. Invades and shakes. The painted embryo has the intensity and power of a living embryo. The above mentioned wooden box that arrived at your house (from Miri Nishri) is like a baby abandoned at your doorstep. In this case (Nishri’s) the simulation and the question create a sense of realism, instead of postponing or disintegrating it. Nishri brings to life the connection of terror and poetry between the painting (the baby) and the text (“Is this baby?”) in a convincing, complex, and mostly human way, that compels you to respond as if the baby were alive. Nishri acts between a conceptual and modern school of thought and primeval painting, that in itself created a “reality” and a “world” (the cave paintings). A must see exhibition.
Adam Baruch (art critic at Maariv – daily Israeli Newspaper)
MAARIV 11.2.2000
