Blood Butterfly Formation | Talia Tokatly
Curator: Dveer Shaked
25.4-4.7.25
When Talia Tokatly was a young girl, a shipment from a vanished world arrived at the family home comprising furniture and objects from her father’s childhood home in Vienna. This was the home he had left to come to Israel on his own before the war in which his family and friends were murdered, and his birth city as he knew it was destroyed. The well-made furniture of impeccable design, the tapestries, wall hangings, objets d’art, paintings, personal belongings and clothing opened Talia’s eyes and stimulated her imagination about the existence of an entire world with which she was unfamiliar: a family, a culture, and an era that used to exist but no longer did.
In the exhibition “Blood Butterfly Formation,” Tokatly sets out from the concrete and imagined domestic space through strands of thought and chains of links dispersed throughout the Mamuta Art and Research Center as a network of personal memories embodied in material and objects. The hybridization of the various pieces of furniture, range of materials and techniques all reflect her thought and work processes, as her hunting and gathering, preservation, processing, integration and stitching stand at the core of the exhibition in terms of materiality, but furthermore, as the conceptual underpinning and Tokatly’s modus operandi in the studio and in the world.
On view are works made with various techniques, ceramic materials, tapes of her father and her granddaughter, altered readymade craft pieces and decorative art, embroidery thread, iron and other natural materials woven into stories, memories, and anecdotes Tokatly collected for years. She transformed all of these elements into syllables and words making up abstract sentences in the main hall and rooms in the cellar where the Mamuta Center is located. They became a world integrating the familiar and the uncanny, combining Vienna and Jerusalem, the concrete and the abstract. Glistening porcelain figurines became hand-sculpted ceramic sculptures placed on sideboards and living room furnishings; a dancer hidden behind drapes in the parental home has been re-cast in porcelain, receiving center stage in the designated glass-fronted cabinet; the piano chair has been hung upside-down; the dining table chairs have been taken apart and reassembled into sculptures, while the tea cart has become an easel.
The material souvenirs from Tokatly’s grandparents’ house do not become memorial monuments, but serve as raw materials for a conceptual and emotional process moving on the axis of memory of the past, being in the present, and thoughts about the future. Installed at the two extreme points of the exhibition space are living creatures: blood butterflies and owls. Blood Butterfly Formation, the work which gave the exhibition its title, binds together the polarities integrated into the entire exhibition: warmth, domesticity, and ease opposed to blood, pain, angst, and sadness. The various opposite sensations come together into a single squadron, perhaps an air force flight formation, or a woman flying planes with a sure touch. The owls observing the space from its opposite end accompany the viewer wandering through and inside the exhibition, and the map created by the route, as they watch and monitor the digestive process and the emission of what cannot be swallowed and assimilated.
Visual artist Talia Tokatly (b. 1949, Tel Aviv-Yafo, lives and works in Mevasseret Zion and in Abu Ghosh), is a sculptor, ceramicist and installation artist. Graduate of the Ceramics Department of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, where she studied under ceramic artist Gedula Ogen, among others, Tokatly taught in the Department of Ceramics and Glass Design for about three decades. Editor of 1280°, the Israeli biannual periodical for material culture. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in leading galleries and museums in Israel and abroad, and garnered numerous prizes, the most recent the Ministry of Culture’s Arik Einstein Award for Senior Artists in 2024.
Mamuta Art and Research Center | Artistic Director: Lea Mauas | Project Manager: Naama Mokady | Space Supervisor and Assistant Producer: Gil Godinger | Mounting: Itamar Mevorach | Lighting: Eitan Haviv | Sound Mix: Daniel Koronkevich | Studio Assistant: Yonatan Oron Ofir | Hebrew text editor: Ronit Rosenthal | Arabic translation: Anwar Ben Badis | English: Y. Appleton | Graphic Design: Maya Shleifer