Hunting The Dead

Ghosts are known to us from culture, literature, and cinema—represented as the dead who have unfinished business with the living, trapped within the narrow confines of a house, restlessly roaming about its rooms; lost, memoryless souls condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. In the case of Hila Laviv, however, it is she, the living artist, who has unfinished business with the dead. Instead of them haunting her—she haunts them.

Laviv’s art is like a channel, or gateway, through which messages from the dead may be conveyed. Some messages are physical—objects, homes, or letters—while others lack a defined form: memories, longings, and thoughts. Laviv inherited these messages from the women who preceded her, women who can no longer carry objects, remember events, or feel any longing; dead women who need a representative, a proxy, to take on everything they were forced to let go of when they died.

Laviv assumes that role. She agrees to become another, perhaps final link in the chain of preservation. Through her, the deceased’s voices may be heard. This makes her a melancholic artist, who holds on to her grief. Melancholia, according to Freud, is the inability to relinquish loss and to let go of a lost object. But the objects in question don’t belong to her: Laviv borrowed them from the treasure trove of family mythology, yet she grapples with their loss as though they were her own.

“I have memories from places I’ve never visited, handed down to me through my grandmother and the objects in her house,” Laviv writes in the exhibition text to Farewell Summer House (Bezalel Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, 2022). In this exhibition, Laviv presented collages derived from an object that belonged to her grandmother Noni Warburg-Shalmon—a farewell album from the family’s summer house in Hamburg.

As she further explains, “This transformative experience has led me to engage artistically with the material, since I believe that surgically examining the objects will ultimately reveal the cipher that can open the portal to the past, enabling me to decrypt it. There is a wish for a collaboration, supposedly impossible, between past and present—to both continue the story and change it at the same time.”

Indeed, Laviv’s work suggests that she is not operating alone. When she’s at the studio, planning, sketching, replicating images, cutting paper, or writing; when she brings her creations to a gallery, dresses its walls and places objects around the space; when she observes the finished exhibition, documents it, experiences it—her actions are part of a collaboration.

In the exhibitions that Laviv has held in recent years—in Israel, Sweden, and Germany—she often dealt with themes of reconstruction. She hung translucent sheets of paper that represented lost objects and let them float outside, vulnerable, exposed to wind, sun, rain, and time. She assembled collages made of photographs taken in an abandoned house, replicating their layers, thus turning them into ghost-like houses. She mounted cutout photographs of one fireplace on the surfaces of another, in another country, to link, almost merge them together.

She replicated old albums and suggested that visitors cut and modify them as they saw fit. In all these instances, Laviv uses materials that were not meant to be preserved—fading materials that can only echo their originals and remind us of what used to be before they disappear. The reconstruction is doomed to failure, which consequently suffuses Laviv’s material choices.

There are two ways in which Laviv’s reconstructions may be interpreted: restoration, as in restoring or rebuilding something lost or eroded; and reenactment—namely, as a performative or theatrical act, like reenacting a crime on camera, or a historical event for a live audience.

The latter type—the reenactment—is what visitors experience as they enter Laviv’s exhibitions, walking about rooms modeled like houses, or as participants in an installation in which they can cut out illustrations or read aloud from printed texts. As Laviv makes use of borrowed materials, her work involves a reenactment of memory, as well—an attempt to give substance and form to something abstract.

In the exhibitions presented in this book, Laviv addresses two
types of objects she received from her grandmother and great-grandmother: homes and books. The latter include photo albums, handicrafts and games manuals, illustrated children’s books in foreign languages, books with bits cut out of them, and books bearing an ex-libris indicating past ownership. The houses are lost objects, abandoned and gone forever.

The books, however, are the complete opposite: they can be carried, reprinted, and maintained in various physical and digital ways. A house is a site—a material place that can be expropriated, demolished, or reoccupied. A book is an object that one has more control over: it can be packed, smuggled, or preserved across different areas and continents.

From the books, Laviv derives knowledge—she learns to cut, fold, replicate. This knowledge is then applied to assemble and reconstruct the lost homes. She uses paper to render items that are normally hard and durable—stone, wood, metal, glass, or marble—into airy, almost transparent paper or fabric shapes.

The title of the exhibition My Rainy-Day Book (Artists’ Studios Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2016) is borrowed from the title of a book published in 1917 by Laviv’s great-grandmother, Anna Warburg, in Sweden. Curator Vered Zafran-Gani wrote that the book “held a profound interest in a material/educational foundation, both aspects of which are touchingly relevant to the identity and contexts of transmitting knowledge.”

Being a kind of handicrafts guide for children, including the creation of paper cutouts, the book “contains a proposal for an entire replicated universe, which in fact allows one to give access, through paper objects, to its contemporaneous and subsequent reality.”

Laviv took on the task of continuing the material and mimetic legacy of that book, in a bid to reconstruct
the house that her grandmother lived in after arriving in Israel—“The House in the Desert,” as she names it. In an empty gallery space, she installed and hung colorful paper cutouts that represented objects and furniture which previously filled that house.

In the exhibition Torpor (Studio of Her Own Gallery, The Painter’s House, Jerusalem, 2022), Laviv recreated the library room from the family’s winter home in Hamburg. It is a “lost home” because, even though it was left behind involuntarily, it is impossible to legally confirm its ownership. Laviv overlaid the interior of the German house over that of the Jerusalem stone house: pieces of a photograph depicting the lost fireplace were installed within the physical one; a picture of a carpet was placed on the floor in front of it; a window was fixed on a window.

In the middle of the mantelpiece, she hung a scissors-shaped paper cutout, in allusion to the scissors she used to cut the others—perhaps a relic, a souvenir, or a mark of ownership. Here, too, the house and the book were perfectly combined: the reconstructed house as a kind of book one can walk around in, in which the paper cutouts are stand-ins for bookmarks—much as a bookmark’s purpose is to direct one to a certain place in a book, so the reading sequence is not forgotten.

The exhibition To Forget Beautiful Things (Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod, 2021) dealt with Grandma Noni Warburg-Shalmon’s summer home in Hamburg, which was abandoned in 1939 after Kristallnacht. Laviv created digital collages of various parts of the house.

In each collage, she overlaid several photos taken at the same spot, thus creating a blurring, out-of-focus effect, as though they were snapshots of ghost rooms. She produced large, magnified prints of these blurry images, covered them with Plexiglass, then positioned them in the gallery, like glossy headstones. In this exhibition, unlike the others, Laviv gave the works a very solid materiality, as though wanting to impose a body on the ghosts. Each such monolith is a kind of haunted object, refusing to draw a clear line between life and death.

Three years later, Laviv used parts of these digital collages in an exhibition in Hamburg—Lost Homes (To Forget Beautiful Things) (Altonaer Museum, 2024). As implied by the title, it was a kind of follow-up exhibition, in which she conducted a series of interventions in the museum’s permanent display by placing objects from its collection in inappropriate places and planting collages of the lost summer home over vitrine boxes containing models of historic German houses. Stacking houses upon each other—a Jewish home over a German one—allowed Laviv to pose questions about loss and belonging and, to some extent, to assert her right over the place she had lost.

“It’s a pity to forget beautiful things,” Anna Warburg wrote to her daughter Noni in the travel journal she made for her to take on the trip away from home. Three generations later, Laviv has heeded Anna’s advice, omitting the words "It’s a pity" to create a new, completely different directive for future generations: “To forget beautiful things.” Perhaps she is saying that it is OK, after all these years, to leave the house behind. Laviv resurrects the lost homes, but as she does so through endless replication, finally nothing remains of them but distant ghost houses that are less and less tangible, less and less conceivable.

The text is published from the book Lost Homes. Our thanks to Hila Laviv and Dana Schweppe for bringing the article to publication in the magazine. Text editing: Einat Adi.

Dana Schweppe is a writer, literary critic, and journalist, as well as the editor and founder of Boo! On Horror in Literature, Cinema, and Culture. She earned her BA from the Bezalel Academy’s Department of Fine Arts and her MA in Literature from Tel Aviv University. Her articles, reviews, and short stories have been published in a variety of newspapers and literary journals. Her debut book, How to Be a Muse, was published in Afik Press.