Hebrew Family Writings

Hebrew Family Writings is a book that was published in a small edition and was exhibited at Gordon Gallery. I had two mystical events in my life, and I am not proud of them, but I like to talk about them :)

I wasn’t looking for this ready-made copy of the book, but I found it in a store, and I immediately bought it. I took it apart completely, deleted and added written parts, and photographs. I created a dialogue between myself and the book.

Originally, it was a theological book by Wilhelm Herzberg about the love of God. In my eyes, it is a religious book that is a love song. The original has a very beautiful element, which was common at the time where each page ends with the first word that appears on the next page. I was struck by that single word. I took it and enlarged it. In the book I made, there is an element of play and testing the limits of fate.

For me, 'Hebrew Family Writing' is a type of musical score, written for a choir, because there are instructions for its performance, you can increase the volume where there is a word that is capitalized, there are notes, and explanations.

The book itself plays with and uses pathos to drill into topics such as Zionism, love, theology. The fact that paper is a ground for collage, for intervention, interested me, as well as the fact that people can take a copy. It was a time when I participated in exhibitions and would often present my work on a table in the gallery instead of on the wall. The works were a stack of pages, pads of paper, and people could pay a few lira, and go home with a work. For example, I had a work called Papers for a Lecture, which basically was four printed pages, which you could read at home and visualize.
-- Yair Garbuz