On View:
February 5 – March 8, 2020
Yael Kanarek’s Regendered Bible unsettles habitual perception of these ancient stories.
For the past two years, Kanarek has been rewriting the Torah in Hebrew and English, reversing the genders of all characters, to reveal the feminine divine of the Torah’s spiritual body. This initiative was inspired by a decade of Kabbalah study, and in response to the astonishing void of women-centered sacred text.
Kanarek explains, “This ‘technical’ adaptation creates a seismographic consciousness shift and exposes individual and collective habitual thinking. The work codifies women’s experience in sacred language with a host of many new female characters in central positions.”
While Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus have been completed in the first draft, during her residency at Romemu, she is currently working on BaMidbar (Numbers) with an objective to complete the Torah and prepare it for publication. Recently, she collaborated with Lab/Shul and did the first ever aliyah with the story of the Akeda.
This exhibition features her Visual Midrashim, as prints, to reveal the potential of the Regendered Bible.
Yael Kanarek is a visual artist and jewelry designer. Her practice focuses on the relationship between language and form. She works in various media from internet art, to large-scale sculpture, to fine jewelry. Kanarek was born in New York City and raised in Israel. She returned in the early 90s to study and practice art and became known for her internet art trilogy World of Awe.
She exhibited her work at the Jewish Museum, The Whitney Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and more. She’s a recipient of fellowships with the Rockefeller New Media grant, Eyebeam, and LABA – The Laboratory for Jewish Culture, where she designed the Hebrew font, Gufanit, for her fine jewelry practice. She is an artist-in-residency at Romemu Center for the year.
In 2018, she installed a large-scale sculpture commissioned by the US Department of State at the new embassy in Zimbabwe.