Yael Eylat Van-Essen PhD – Curator / Researcher

“Boaz Tal – Homage”, was the first exhibition of Tal’s work shown after his death. The exhibition related to the artist’s complex relationship to the concept of death, traces of which can be found in his artistic work long before his own decease, and before the death of his wife and his daughter.

The photographs presented in this exhibition are taken from a body of work defined by Tal as self-portraits. In these photographs he has chosen to mark his identity through his family members whom he considered as part of his being. This self-signification is manifested in the present exhibition in a series of black and white allegories shot in the intimate domestic space, quoting famous works from art history, as well as large colored photographs, representing each one of the family members separately, shot outside the home.

Tal’s works are loaded with Christian iconography. This exhibition examines among others, the ways in which Tal has used the ‘Pietà’ image, in relation to the writing of Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who saw the responsibility towards the ‘other’ as the essential structure of subjectivity. In some of the works shown in this exhibition we witness a reversal of roles, an artistic motive repeated in Tal’s works: The place of the son or the daughter has been taken over by the artist father/husband. Levinas’s relation to death is reverberated in the way he offered to see our relationship to it as a consequence of our intellectual and emotional presence of knowing ‘the other’. Death, according to his perception, is an existential experience, expressed by fear and discomfort, deriving from the subject’s recognition that he is facing his own death. The exhibition transforms this feeling, but at the same time, the strength of the works exhibited lies in the way they mediate moments of tenderness and intimacy, taking place only in states of vitality.