Three Sets
Odelia Elhanani
Curator: Eti Namir
 
In her solo exhibition, Odelia Elhanani examines the status of domestic objects as a material archive. Porcelain pieces, which have been passed down and preserved through three generations of the family’s women, stop fulfilling their destiny and are diverted from their functional course into a realm of exploration and renewed configuration. The exhibition features intact vessels, maps, and shards; wholeness and cracks coexist as part of an ongoing array of memory. The moment of the material’s disintegration is treated not as a loss but as a turning point leading to a new memory edifice.
 
The broken pieces are piled up and made into minute towers – intimate monuments created through sculptural installation that confer a new existence on the shards. The notion of a monument, historically identified with materials of presumed durability and permanence, is put to the test here – not as a steady symbol but as a structure created through assembly and disassembly. The shattered porcelain suggests a new reading of the term, and memory is formulated in matter that has endured touch, usage, and inter-generational transfer. The small edifices indicate a different possibility of commemoration.
 
 
 
The sculptural move occurs in an ongoing dialogue with photography. The exhibition features photographic images, some of which have been manually manipulated, alongside sculptural bodies made from pieces of broken china. The tiny structures are documented in photographs, but the actual shards do not remain within their borders; they reappear in the space and emerge from the image, taking their place on the wall. Next to the shard sculptures, a cup is displayed in a glass vitrine – a cast made from a mold of a cup Elhanani had received as a wedding gift. The pattern of the family china is hand-drawn on it – a hybrid cup, uniting two generations on the time axis.
The objects are both photographic images and physically present. The photograph is not documentation; it has an active role in a broad transformative move – a process in which the vessel breaks away from its function and moves toward a symbolic realm.
 
In another body of work, Elhanani focuses on the undersides of plates from three different china sets: her grandmother’s, her mother-in-law’s, and her own. This usually unseen area bears the manufacturer’s stamp, the country of origin, and series numbers. Next to the industrial stamp, a hand-drawn symbol sometimes appears, testifying to a collection’s accession code or a catalog number from a preservation process. What lies normally under the surface is exposed here and placed front and center. The artist has added her signature to the production and collection markings, in embroidery on the photograph. The act of signing does not erase the past but is written on it, joined to it, and enhances it – a renewed claim to a story that moved between industrial production and family memory. The three photographed plates coalesce into a family portrait, a tale of three sets that exist side by side, each bearing the distinct marks of time.