Multimedia Installation
With Dirty Laundry alpha nova & galerie futura presents Adi Liraz’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. In her multi-media works, which primarily take the form of textiles, she examines the presence and function of memory and suggests ways to make marginalized voices heard and experienced.
At the center of the project is the examination of her family history as a descendent of the Greek-speaking Jewish community of Romaniots, who are primarily based in Ioannina. Starting with the life and history of her grandmother, Adi Liraz negotiates historical representations and narrations of womanhood as well as the roles and voices of women within this community. She addresses questions of commemorative culture and collective memory, as well as experiences of migration and exile. In doing so, she uses and weaves textiles that she embroidered and produced herself, along with found materials, photographs, and organic (bodily) fluids with elements of traditional Romaniot craft and textile traditions. These complex textile works, which connect Jewish ritual and poetry with family history and personal experience becomes an artistic exploration of love, loss, desire, betrayal, and the struggle for recognition and female emancipation. Through the reuse of materials, common symbols, and handicraft techniques that were customary among the Romaniot and in the Ottoman Empire, the works become textile archives, whose materialities refer to definitions of belonging and migration. The works, most of which were created in Ioannina, Greece, become a form of storytelling through their material culture and are presented as a storehouse of knowledge to tell the story of Romaniot women, which has received little attention.
One of Liraz’s aims is to rewrite history(s) by de-academizing and de-institutionalizing oral tradition and redefining prevailing symbolisms. She intends to radicalize and reclaim conceptions of intimacy and domesticity, with the goal of reappropriating them.
Dirty Laundry questions conceptions of home that extend beyond national, cultural-religious, and patriarchal structures, thereby also challenging notions of a monolithic Judaism. The exhibition presents textile works, a series of photographs, and a video performance by the artist. A program of live performance and workshop by Adi Liraz and an artist talk will accompany the exhibition.
Adi Liraz is an interdisciplinary artist currently working between Berlin, Germany, and Ioannina, Greece. Adi holds a Master in Arts from the Art Academy Berlin Weißensee (“Art in Public Context, Spatial Strategies”) and a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. She has exhibited and performed in various places around Germany, Greece, and Israel/Palestine and also works as an educator focusing on both contemporary and historical political realities in collaboration with different institutions in Germany and in Greece. www.adiliraz.com
Artist Talk (online) with Adi Liraz & Persefoni Myrtsou
6.10.2021 // 19:00
Link to the recording of the artist talk
In the artist talk Persefoni Myrtsou will talk with Adi Liraz about her experience with her first solo exhibition. They will discuss views on concepts, methods and materials that shape Adi’s, but also Persefoni’s artistic practice, such as women’s labour, informal knowledge and collective authorship, unofficial heritage and memory work, national identity and marginal belonging, patriarchal embodiments and female materiality.
Persefoni Myrtsou is a visual & performance artist, and anthropologist. She has a BA in Fine Art (Glasgow School of Art) and an MA from the Institute of Art in Context (UdK Berlin). Currently she is a doctoral student at the Institute for European Ethnology
(HU Berlin), where she is researching artists’ migration through the perspectives and everyday practices of artists who live in and between Istanbul, Athens and Berlin. In her work Persefoni focuses on the practice of denationalism through the use of subversion, cultural appropriation & humor, but also through memory work and community building. She often performs as her Turkish alter ego, Ayşenur. In the last couple of years, she is engaged with peace andcare activism in the Greece-Turkey context. She lives and works in Istanbul. www.persefonimyrtsou.com / www.aysenurbabuna.com
