Tobaron Waxman

With a background in portraiture, performance, and Hassidic Judaism, my current practice considers flesh as a working material of mutable meanings, to inscribe both with and upon. Beyond fixed notions of body, gender, and ‘home’, my practice contextualizes gender, embodiment, and the physical experience of time as systems of inscription. My work includes elements of Diaspora experience and traditional Jewish texts, music, and philosophy, as well as politics and desire.

My live art practice is articulated through various time- and lens-based media: photography, video, voice, tissue engineering, internet, biofeedback processing, performance, and social interventions. In my work, I interrogate how citizenship makes moral and ethical claims upon our bodies.

The project I have proposed is called Mechitza 7.1. It is an interactive sound installation, and part of a currently untitled tryptich of works. A mechitza is the separation architecture between women and men in a Jewish prayer space. ‘7.1’ is both a Jewish metatextual reference about nation and destiny as well as indicative of this piece being composed for surround sound with seven channels. Mechitza 7.1 will manifest a separation wall in focused sound. An elision is made between sacred/taboo space, and ‘ethnically cleansed’ space, using interactive audio, as a way to interrogate the notion of border.

With Mechitza 7.1 I pose a question: could I design a different way to mark the distinction between places or sites; in a manner which didn’t require one site to determine itself by way of constant abrasion by its alleged ‘opposite’? This conceptual piece reflects on the segregatory architecture that controls public and private space, imposed by the state – both in the obvious case of the ‘separation fence’ between Israel and Palestine, and other more systemic examples like military check points, and the currently re-enflamed violence in Gaza of December 2008.