Transcending the Ladder

"At the
beginning, the creative act is in the telling; unobtrusively spoken—‘live-art’.
This storytelling may be repeated often, until a form becomes implicit and,
along with it, a title. The result is then written or performed or photographed
or filmed, etc.

The contest opens. ‘Are you male or female?’

Simulated response: ‘I am e-mail and my name is Jack the Lad.’
(Tanya Ury, from Transcending the
Ladder)

Tanya Ury’s latest project, Jacob’s Ladder, a video
and photography installation, is a complex reflection on Jewish identity in
post-Holocaust Germany and post-1989 Europe. It is part of a series of several
art works based on Ury’s fascination with the legend of Jacob ‘which was
originally engendered by many and complex recurring childhood dreams. In those
dreams, menacingly deep escalators tumbled and slid the traveller into an
underworld, from turned-up-level steps. There were also shaky elevator
constructions made of bare planks on building sites of Babel proportions; and
then there were the piles of chairs that reached precariously up into starlit
heavens, which one dared to clamber, only as a last resort when pursued by
demons. A process of collecting together ideas and raw material in more recent
years, eventually lead to several art works, directly or indirectly inspired by
the stories of Jacob’s vision of a ladder to heaven, and his struggle with the
angel.’
Tanya Ury will present Transcending the
Ladder, a performative reading accompanied by slides and video,
which comments on this work-in-process and positions it in a net of references
and associations from art history, collective imagery, religion, politics, and
sexual practices.

Organised
by: Mesto žensk / City of Women
In co-operation with: Mednarodni graficni likovni center – MGLC.