At the close, there was silence.

A silence that was a terrible and taxing cacophony. Deafening and demanding. Persistence without presence. A violent longing for something lost. A surplus of energy that demands a space which it may infiltrate, exist within, and disrupt. 

This mandate to violate the post-culmination balance and to shatter the ultimate silence is sustained by the refusal to accept absence. It will smash, tear, and rip apart. It will do everything it can to recreate what was lost, and if not restore it, at least fashion its remnants. And if that is impossible, at least commit to its memory, and if this also may not be, profess its lack. 

Such a silence does not settle. It emerges from the disruption, from the moment presence becomes absence. It dissents from the sequential directive of time and place. It spreads throughout the body but has no interest in the flesh. For silence, the form is just a vast space that gapes along a vertical axis linking head to heart.   

The body of work presented by Moran Lee Yakir in the exhibition “Come back, I must leave” establishes form born of the saturated din of silence, one shaped by motion spanning delay and desperate abandon. One that arises from rejecting grief. Rebuffing separation. 

The absentee and absence are instilled in the inner space. The inherently separate body becomes a form of non-separateness. A space which others may see as a seeping wound but one which Yakir perceives as a choreographed spatial sequence. A plane in which she attempts to restore the entirety of existence she knows will always remain unattainable. 

She insists on her right to preserve sorrow, persist in pain, wallow in loss. To entrench a hermetically sealed space where the remnants that still linger may reside.  

As we consider an as-yet unrealized loss, we already know who will be gone but cannot guess the internal rift it will produce within us: an eternal space that expands into a world seeking to establish and enroot the very thing that disappeared and produced the rift, the very thing that threatens to leave it empty and pointless. 

Instead of gaping open in the shape of the one lost to us, the fractured space takes up the form of loss itself. This absence is not silent. It contains movement. It has rhythm. It demolishes and cloaks itself in the ruins. It is animated by the fact that the one who was lost may never be recovered – while loss may be eternally perpetuated. 

Loss tears open a space similar to tinnitus, that same piercing and incessant sound that has no outside source and cannot be heard by any other, and yet it abides. Present in all things. Imposing itself on the day-to-day and undermining basic sensory experiences. A phantom condition tailored to an induvial scale.  

The mental space is akin to tinnitus not only in its stubborn retention of its presence. Indeed, the emotional excess functions like sound, vibrating and alive, continuously reverberating between the body’s limits, coming in waves, duplicated, intensifying layers of a long-gone source.  

How is it possible to cope with this relentless presence? With this omni-present absence? This is only achievable through grief. Only by accepting loss, acceding to concealment, being able to let go. The healing process cannot proceed without separation, and separation cannot be realized without faith in the future and its power to heal, or at least alleviate. 

“Time heals all wounds”, according to the cliché, but Yakir is an unbeliever. Time does not impress her. The tempo she hears has a time of its own, and the past is not behind her. Quite the opposite, it is going strong in the present. It persists as a chronological breakdown. Time does exist, but it has lost the power to propel forward. Time’s axis coils around itself at the point in which Yakir pauses to reflect upon the final absence. One irreparable and unrestorable. Time does not advance; it is merely a cadence. The heart has ceased to beat, but its nonexistent rhythm stubbornly and compulsively perseveres. 

Yakir uproots pain from its source. Excruciatingly and passionately, she transmutes broken time into space, one into which a flock (or family?) of reddish-brown ceramic forms of various shapes and sizes assemble. They seem in the midst of a motion frozen in place. A still choreography. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tzrUd4lGsI&t=24s

Ceramics evoke human history and culture. Clay does not decompose or break down. It simply stands. In every ceramic piece, from the earliest vessels of ancient civilizations to the porcelain artworks of Asian and European royal courts and beyond, the culture which produces the work is evident. Each one expresses identity, a symbol that traverses borders and languages, ethnicity and class, harkening to a common past and tradition. The material embodies earth, water, and fire, and thus a substance of the natural world that has undergone the cycles of life and death. Every piece marks minute intersections in the fabric of existence, and every encounter with ceramics is always familiar. 

Yakir veered beyond the bounds of the ceramic tradition and employs this medium to suit her needs. She creates forms that seem to follow the steps of sorcery: pagan animals shaped and molded on the pottery wheel. Link by link, these assemble together with crude screws, an uncomfortable element for the material and viewers alike. The direct and rough contact between the burnt and exposed ceramic substance and the cold metal of the large and polished screws exposes the potential for breaking in each form. It reveals their fragility, demonstrating all are made by human hand. A ceremonial vessel of unknown purpose. 

Yakir’s hands press down on the rim. Every link is hollowed out, an empty shell. Using the motion of the pottery wheel she molds the cylindrical lungs of each figure so that it may contain and echo sound waves. She shapes echo vessels: bodies of reverberation. 

Terracotta, the raw material Yakir has chosen, is permeated with iron. In ceramic tradition, it is considered simple and inexpensive. Its iron content enables emphasizing the nuances of reverberating sound, to deepen the tinnitus signals.  

The ceramic flock is arrayed in the three central positions, with each producing different sounds, ones that also vary according to the location of the moving listener as they roam among the clay clusters, thus taking part in the stationary choreography. 

One point is held by a tall and narrow cone standing erect. Band after band, becoming increasingly narrow. The very last band at the top bends like a two-jointed finger raised from above, almost three meters tall, to reveal a gaping tip. It disturbs the disciplined logic of the bands below. Perhaps it wants to tell us something. Perhaps it ran out of air, inhaled through one of the attached arms and exhaled through another. In this manner, low and rumbling frequencies thrum inside the cone to emerge from its mouth, filling the space like a subterranean vibration. 

A second point includes three figures. Two of them seem to be ceramic animals. They stand silently beside a tripod: three heads at different heights, skin to family members leaning on one another. Their mouths gape open and in the center of each is a sharp-pronged tongue. Each maw produces its own range of frequencies, its own unique tenor. Their tempo is fragmented, then lengthens. They follow cycles which are inconsistent and thus intersect at odd points. The ongoing sound is a hope for a different time, a chance at the infinite, an extraction from linearity. In their irregular cyclicality, their voices undermine chronological time, questioning time itself, that cannot exist “in time.”

In the central point are three curving “tails” that emerge from the wall, narrowing at their tips. Beside them stands a cone that seems to have bloomed from the floor. Facing them are four pointed cones that spring from the wall (or ceiling), reminiscent of the tongues of the three tripod figures. 

These tails and cones also reveal gaping mouths. At first, they seem to be utterly silent, but they are not. As one approaches, the voices become audible. You must lean close and strain to listen. Each repeats a fragment of a sentence over and over.  Those listening by order can barely pick up a broken paragraph. But even if we assemble the pieces, they will always remain in pieces. The echoes from within these forms remain echoes after they emerge. Progress is impossible. Separateness is not an option. Singularity cannot be reached. Every figure constitutes a part of the entirety disrupted without end. A tear within a frayed continuum. The figures produce a song, a keening lament of the past that insists on being and consuming the present. 

Perhaps this is because of the cannibalistic nature of mourning. In our fidelity to the ones we have lost, we seek to internalize them. Digest them. But the very refusal to grieve is also a mark of loyalty. Rejecting the absorption of the other means recognizing they are apart from us. An acknowledgement that the one who was lost was singular and that loss itself is singular. 

“Come back, I must leave”.

Strange to realize what is left in memory. Odd that a random sentence can be transformed into a relic of almost holy significance, an artifact that serves as a key, a Rosetta Stone for the soul. When you come back, I will leave. If you do not come back, I cannot leave. The voice intertwines with the echo. In any case, there can only be one. Only one may remain.