Hagar Ophir brings the potentialities of past histories into our present, thereby enabling us to imagine futures differently. Her ongoing project Bound with the Living unfolds as a collective enquiry centring on objects dense with memory, activating them through ritual conjuring, breaking into the time of the past, and unsettling history’s linearity. In the charged space that opens up in the process, ancestral knowledge presses into the present, loosening what appears fixed and reconfiguring contemporary realities. This conjuring insists on an encounter with what persists in shadow – unfinished histories, unquiet presences and the weight of what remains unresolved.
The multi-sensorial installation Bound with the Living: Gathering in Venice includes a stage for séances created by Ophir together with Antonia Eckardt, featuring a Ouija board that welcomes spirits who speak and read a variety of languages, including Arabic and Yiddish. The audience is invited to engage with models of the objects that are used during the séances. Each model is accompanied by a binaural sound work that firmly situates them as conveyors of knowledge while transposing the listener into the different spatio-temporalities the objects have witnessed. Sound is key; by listening with their whole bodies the visitors are invited to open themselves up to the return of the spirits that haunt the objects.
—Ma’ayan Ashash and Miriam Schickler
