Ra-Ma-Ch Eivarim (2025)

An homage performance

In 1997, during the Balkan Wars, performance artist Marina Abramović (1946-) performed ‘Balkan Baroque’ at the Venice Biennale. In the pavilion's basement, Abramovic was seated on a pile of 1,500 freshly cut beef bones beneath a video triptych. Visitors endured the stench of rotting flesh to watch the artist as she scrubs the bones with a rag or metal brush, humming folk songs, repeatedly for four days. As Abramovic states, she was living abroad when the war broke out, and she couldn’t respond to it while it was unfolding, recalling that “so many artists immediately react and make the work and protests on the horrors of that war. And I remember that I could not do anything. It was too close to me….The whole idea that by washing bones and trying to scrub the blood, is impossible. You can't wash the blood from your hands as you can't wash the shame from the war.” 

רמ״ח איברים (Ra-Ma-Ch Eivarim) responds to a different war, identity, and folklore, with an homage to Abramovic's performance in Balkan Baroque. For several months, I have been casting ice bones daily, making 248 limbs or organs. Ra-Ma-Ch was performed on a crisp fall day, in a pond at Rosekill Farm in Upstate New York. The 248 ice casts were piled on top of a floating platform. I am seated behind the mound, embracing it with my limbs, arms and legs. A dark red fluid is pouring out of my mouth, staining the bright, chilling bones. As I attempt to clean the bones with a cloth, they break and fall back into the heap. I then rest my head on the ice, embracing it fully; birds chirping, the ice heap clucking. Time passing, my body heat, and the red liquid gradually solidify the ice-cast limbs into a single unit; Ra-Ma-Ch is humanity melting.  

Ra-Ma-Ch Eivarim literally means two-hundred-fourty-eight organs, and refers to an ancient Jewish count of organs that make a human. The number 248 has spiritual meanings in the Jewish tradition and corresponds with the 248 positive commandments. Maimonides opens the Introduction to the Code of Law, the Mishne Torah, with a verse from Psalms (119:7): “Then I would not be ashamed when I regard all Your commandments.” Such a duality of embracement and embarrassment of scriptures has been discussed by various scholars and is a core aspect in my interpretation of the Balkan Baroque, examining the war in terms of responsibility, collectivity, complicity, and tradition. In this homage performance, I both study the work of Abramovic and host it in my body, time, and place, embodying a guest-host form. It is a gesture towards archive-making that blurrs a past-present, guest-host, art-life, teach-learn dynamic and builds on a notion of work’s continuity, accumulation, mutuality, relations, and endurance through time.