Kavana
January 2 – February 2, 2020
Jewish thought suggests that the memory of an action is as primary as the action itself. This is to say that when my hand is wounded, I remember other hands. I trace ache back to other aches—when my mother grabbed my wrist too hard pulling me across the intersection, when my great-grandmother’s fingers went numb on the ship headed towards Cuba fleeing the Nazis, when Miriam’s palms enduringly poured water for the Hebrews throughout their biblical desert journey—this is how the Jew is able to fathom an ache. Because no physical space is a constant for the Jewish diaspora, time and the rituals that steep into it are centered as a mode of carrying on. The bloodline of a folktale, a tradition, a song, pulses through interpretation and enactment. Treating photographs in Kavana as such, I explore notions of Jewish memory, narrative heirlooms, and interpretive image making. The works are positioning themselves in the past as memories, in the present as stories being told, and in the future as rituals to interpret and repeat. To encounter an image in this way is not only to ask what it feels like, but to ask: what does it remember like?
Actions Performed on the Last Day of Kaddish
At the tombstone unveiling,
You scoop a rock from the dirt layered above your grandmother’s purified body.
You dig a tangled mass of red thread out of your pocket.
You pull a single string out from the veiny heap,
clip it loose with the edge of your tooth.
Tie the string in a circle around the rock.
Double knot the loop.
Place it on top of the grave marker.
You pull another thread loose.
You wrap it around your mother’s wrist.
You double knot the loop.
Both of you:
hands raised, palms up,
Your mother fastens another circle around yours.
A stitch is lost unless it is knotted.
Hannah Altman is a Jewish-American artist from New Jersey. Her work interprets relationships between body, interiority, feminine performance, and lineage, exploring the structures that perpetuate them using photographic-based media. She has recently exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Junior High Gallery in Los Angeles, and the University of Passau in Germany. Her work has been published in the Carnegie Museum of Art Storyboard, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, and i-D. She has delivered lectures on her work and research across the country, including at Yale University, the Society for Photographic Education’s Southeast Conference, and Six x Ate artist lecture series. She is an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University and the 2019 recipient of the Bertha Anolic Israel Travel Award.
