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Queen of Sorrow
Curator: Sherry Golan, Assistant Curator: Gili Zeidman. 2025
Adva Drori's first solo museum exhibition is an immersive installation, inviting the viewer to a multi-layered sensory journey. Memory, trauma, and healing combine in a work that intertwines personal intimacy with collective space. The Hebrew word for sorrow (etsev) in the exhibition's title also denotes a nerve in the physiological sense. In his book The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist and researcher Bessel van der Kolk demonstrates how imaging techniques such as MRI can be used to identify the effects of trauma on the brain's nerves, providing insight into the processes of neural and emotional healing.
The floor is covered in green artificial grass, a material that recurs in Drori's works as a dual element: it evokes the fields in the kibbutz where the artist spent her childhood, representing a space of nature and communal life, yet is also a processed synthetic substance, serving as a metaphor for the tension between the natural and the artificial, as well as between authenticity or individuality and a societal structure that imposes uniformity. The low perspective, from the ground up—"from grass level"—invites a fresh examination of childhood memories and concepts, such as home, intimacy, and vulnerability. It encapsulates magic and wonder coupled with a desire for an artistic experience marked by a slower pace, allowing viewers to sit on the green and spend time in the gallery.
The exhibition space is strewn with objects made of wool and felt, alongside children’s clothing gathered from kibbutzim across the country and other sources. Hammocks, onto which children's clothes have been attached, are scattered throughout the space, inviting the audience to sit, rock, and become enveloped in the (literally and metaphorically) delicate fabric crafted by Drori. Despite the embracing sense of softness, however, the works also evoke pain and memory. The acts of sewing, embroidery and felting symbolize not only mending, but also penetration, cutting, and piercing, representing processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, much like the labor of healing, which is both traumatic and liberating. Many of the works incorporate short phrases, such as "breathe past pain," which can be interpreted as the artist's guidance for successfully navigating the ongoing process of reconciling the past and healing, while complex childhood experiences continually intrude upon the present.
Drori draws inspiration from the concept of holding, introduced by psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott, referring to the physical and emotional support that a mother offers her infant. In the installation, the act of holding is embodied not only in the interaction with the materials, but also in the collective presence: the audience itself becomes an integral part of the work, inviting a public-social gaze into its private space. Drori creates a new kind of space, one that seeks to establish an "emotional holding" of the viewer, emphasizing the ability to support the other, particularly in situations of distress, pain, or insecurity. It is a safe setting for fundamental emotions that range from pleasure to threat, from devotion to lack of control.
The installation provides a dynamic experience. Visitors move back and forth between feeling a sense of belonging to a community and confronting exposure and vulnerability. Through audience participation, Drori probes how an intimate space can evolve into a collaborative space, and how art can function as a tool for both personal and collective healing. Above all, Drori's works propose a profound shift in the perception of concepts such as community and state, a proposal that may extend beyond the current exhibition to resonate within any human space.


















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