Transcending the Ladder

"At the beginning, the creative act is in the telling; unobtrusively spoken—‘live-art’. This storytelling may be repeated often, until a form becomes implicit and, along with it, a title. The result is then written or performed or photographed or filmed, etc.
The contest opens. ‘Are you male or female?’
Simulated response: ‘I am e-mail and my name is Jack the Lad.’
(Tanya Ury, from Transcending the Ladder)

Tanya Ury’s latest project, Jacob’s Ladder, a video and photography installation, is a complex reflection on Jewish identity in post-Holocaust Germany and post-1989 Europe. It is part of a series of several art works based on Ury’s fascination with the legend of Jacob ‘which was originally engendered by many and complex recurring childhood dreams. In those dreams, menacingly deep escalators tumbled and slid the traveller into an underworld, from turned-up-level steps. There were also shaky elevator constructions made of bare planks on building sites of Babel proportions; and then there were the piles of chairs that reached precariously up into starlit heavens, which one dared to clamber, only as a last resort when pursued by demons. A process of collecting together ideas and raw material in more recent years, eventually lead to several art works, directly or indirectly inspired by the stories of Jacob’s vision of a ladder to heaven, and his struggle with the angel.’
Tanya Ury will present Transcending the Ladder, a performative reading accompanied by slides and video, which comments on this work-in-process and positions it in a net of references and associations from art history, collective imagery, religion, politics, and sexual practices.

Organised by: Mesto žensk / City of Women
In co-operation with: Mednarodni graficni likovni center – MGLC.