Reviews
Haaretz | Gallery
Avi Pitchon
Art Critics
Its beginning and end - a short video loop with a flock of hundreds of birds circling or landing on a trio of huge cranes at sunset, and an insane diorama in which a theatrical phantasmagoria that combines a "flock" of cranes with a garden labyrinth, angels, shipwrecks and architectural monuments - amazing. "
The 'Window" | An art blog
Smadar Sheffi
Curator
"The F(a)ether Archivist: An Autobiographical Mythology" by Jackie Perel is a fascinating project in aesthetics as much as in the narrative and the scope of the issues. At its center is the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, which undergoes a gender reversal and revolves around Pearl's relationship with her father. The detail she discovers about her father is that he adopted a falcon and that he has already passed away. Through a space copied from a feather archive in Germany, you reach a huge diorama where a relief from the 17th century depicting the myth is dismantled to cut outs that float in a forest of cranes . The white cranes and the floating figures, the deceptive depth create a strange and compelling image, a mixture of talking about the price of progress (cranes - accelerated development and workers falling), the inherent human hubris (Icarus that flies high) and the complexity of parent-child relationships.
The walls lined with classified dismantled wings speak of the price of colonialism. Crushing nature into tables, details, dead objects. The affinity to previous art, from that of Rebecca Horn to Dana Levy, is present as part of the cultural context in which the work was created.
Architechture and Design | Ynet
Talia Levi-Rosenboim
Art Critics
Jackie Pearl's work entitled "The F(e)athers Archivist: An autobiographical Mythology" also emphasizes the construction's elements as it spans two rooms and uses an existing window in the building as a frame for the installation she created. The installation includes a video of a crane with dozens of flying birds on it, a video of the work of collecting and cataloging the feathers in the archive in Germany and behind the window a combination of them.
Statues of cranes stand inside the window frame. Pearl, who came from the field of theater and directing, will further turn the installation into a theater performance. Behind the window frame stands a kind of lighted stage with mythological figures and crane sculptures of different sizes that are so identified in the current period with the emerging urban landscape.
Haaretz | Gallery
Shaul Seter
Art critic
“Jackie Pearl puts on a layered and multi-sectioned story: Both in the exhibit and performance, she puts Sodom as a history place, of all things. Pearl shows photos of the potash factory established at Sodom, on the banks of the Dead Sea, in the 1930s, along with the cinema for its employees inside a cave there; she reads sections from the diary of the factory workers who were separated from their families and led to the dessert; she places the cement mixer converted into a salt processor. Alongside these, she echoes the mythological Sodom, the sin city, Lot’s city that whores its daughters, the city of the women looking back: In a small Sodom bed that’s in the space, in quoting the Quran mentions of Lot’s people – the homosexuals – in Bonnie Taylor’s famous song, “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” in which she demands to look back and see. The cocoon of contexts is a heavy and complex one – nothing compared to the enigma that is Lot.”
Laisha | Wandering discovers and shares
Asi Friedman
Art critic, LaIsha.
“De Zone exhibit is about the misleading effect of mirage, that same optic experience characterizing dessert sceneries. Jackie Pearl’s video art piece is especially exciting, based on the story of the Sodom potash factory’s workers…”
Yediot Aharonot | Acre Festival
Shai Bar-Yaakov
Yediot Aharonot theater critic
“…a rebellious and anti-establishment voice…”
The play excels in its imaginative design and an unconventional look at the world created from the connection between the poetic text to the unique design, accentuating the dirty and estranged surroundings.
Pearl herself plays the narrator in a gentle yet ironic performance, while the two actresses on stage – Rotem Goldenberg and Anat Zonenfeld – help her fulfil her vision well…
The play manages to sensitively and compassionately express the other viewpoint of the girl/woman who is estranged from her environment and feels as if she’s an amphibious creature simultaneously existing under and above the water.”
Haaretz – Gallery
Revital Madar
Black Flag
The two artists present a closed space, which is a room at a mental hospital ward. There, where most of the plot takes place, female characters multiply over and over again, switch roles, trapped in a space and yet manage to old on to the identity that outsteps the confines of the institute, thanks to their ethnic and gender identities that are momentarily present…
A more complex, and much needed discussion on the question of identity… Marginalized identities mostly live within conflicts, and ‘Pnina Lev Ni’ar’ (Pnina Paper heart) leans on a few of these, which add to the elementary disorder that’s present within her solely from existing in a place where women are defined by society as mentally ill. The time in which the plot takes place… is out of context, invalid in the reality as it’s presented to us and could attest to the detachment of the women hospitalized there, yet the projects that are occasionally exposed in the background make it clear that narrowing it down to this matter alone would be simplistic. This gap, between the date and the setting, also sometimes exists in various places in the country as well; places that were already abandoned by the state, and anyone who’d visit them from the outside wouldn’t understand how they froze in time.
Another contrast within which the plot moves, is between the pure and the filthy. The nurse’s robe: Mostly bright white but sooty in the neckline and hem, showing the two polarities on one woman’s body – the institutional nurse. The pearls, a repeating motif in the play, are an expression of purity but at the same time – unlike on the neck of the bourgeois woman – the pearls here are out of control: They’re given to the patients as innovative medicine, who in turn have trouble swallowing the gems. When they refuse to do so, they spew out long, unhooked chains of pearls that scatter on the floor in a way that can’t be collected.
Another complex dealing with identity is seen in the dialogue between Pnina and the new girl who arrives at the ward: She’s brown-skinned, has short hair, and hates the dresses they force on her body solely based on her gender. The girl, who goes by the name Dudi, even though her parents named her Tikva, arrives at the ward while Pnina bangs her head at the bed. Dudi asks her different questions, such as “What ethnicity are you?” and “Do you believe in God?” and this opens up a liberating back and forth between them: “Yardena or Ofra?” Pnina asks and Dudi asks, “Zohar Argov or Ofer Levi?” and “Labor or Liberal?” the questions remain unanswered; Dudi and Pnina are captive in a game in which they ask each other about their boundaries, but neither one of them is required to choose any. The lack of reply doesn’t prevent them from understanding where each of them came from, but this information is given gently, through an innocent game, without any of them being required to declare herself, adjusting her performance to the information given by her. Without saying LGBTQ or Sephardic, Vazana, Greenwald and Pearl offer a gentle and sensitive discussion on identities, it is a slight one but one that’s just as present as that of the flag bearers.
Martha Knows | Theater Magazine
‘Shouting Pearls and Beads on the Floor’
“…in this play, the artists bring with them the entire metropolitan. The stunning set design, created following Pearl’s ideas and by the hands of designer Zohar Shoef, transformed the establishment’s bedroom into the entire city, on all its rooftops, water tanks, with the moon illuminating all of it. There’s also a fascinating use of puppets, which were uniformly designed on all their shapes and types, while each serving a different purpose. These puppets, the imaginative work of Pearl, make the entire play rise to new heights and flutter the viewers’ hearts.”
The Sting | A Special Project
Edited by Tehila Hakimi
Poet and author
“Pnina Lev Ni’ar”: The Only Medication to Suffering is Beauty
“The play starts off with measured thumps created by the actresses on stage, and slowly, during the 50 exciting minutes of the play, this rhythm also turns into a heartbeat, my heartbeat. Three actresses are talking about childhood from afar, childhood that bears a lot of pain but also entails everything we all knew at school, at the neighborhood – the same scenery. The text is wonderous, the entire setting is the handiwork of Jacqueline, paper-painted creations and special photographs that move to the rhythm, the costumes, the music and movement on stage, all create such a beautiful and exciting piece, and it all works with the beating of the heart. Jacqueline succeeds in exposing and treating a terribly difficult subject with such gentleness and beauty that produces simultaneously harsh and releasing sensations, and the setting of the water tanks above the projects and beyond the pain. I cried a lot but also left with a smile on my face, I’ve never seen such a beautiful and gentle pain. Thank you, Jacqueline and Hana, I hope you take your beautiful creation to many more stages.”
