Katya Oicherman: Torah binders as a locus of auto-biographical writing

Binding auto-biographies: Torah binders as a locus of auto-biographical writing

Textile is a way to tell a story. Text and textile, fabric and fabrication are words that in their etymological connection manifest that possibility. Halfway between being rightful objects and raw materials textiles oscillate in their function and in the way they work – as surfaces, canvasses, subjectiles (J. Derrida 1998), waiting to be acted upon and as self-sustaining and self-supporting things, which nevertheless retain something of a surface. Ever-present attribute of human habitat and corporeal culture textiles often exist in mundane, barely noticed mode, bearing traces of bodies who used them, acted upon them, conjuring up stories of different volume and visibility which in a way accompany, complement or even re-interpret life-stories that could be told by the people themselves. History of production and embellishment of textiles forms a significant part of material culture, through which the oscillation between a thing and a raw material, and the biographical story-telling potential imbedded in the subjectilian, surface-like nature of a textile can be traced as it interlaces with histories of technology, sociality, gender, aesthetics and religion, re-emerging again and again as cloth. I will discuss how contemporary biographical and auto-biographical narrative emerges as a re-casting of a traditional form of a Torah binder, a Jewish biographical ceremonial textile.

In my art-practice I selectively transpose, using hand embroidery, aspects of my auto-biography and my grand-mothers' biography into the traditional format of a Bavarian binder from 1836. I suggest that as a result of that operation the binder, uniquely embodying in its production, ceremonial function and particular history, the transition between subjectile and object, becomes a new object-sign, a position, speaking or rather embroidering from which, facilitates creation of material narratives of selfhood. Those narratives interact with and re-cast universal conventions of identity description (IDs) and subvert gender codifications of the traditional Judaica objects. Relating to the marginal tradition of Western “female crafts” and their contemporary resonance in art-practices, the co-operation of woven cloth and embroidery needle becomes a way to reflect critically on the place and function of a materialized auto-biographical narrative in a text-dominated world. Materiality of the written word and its bearer, the cloth, becomes a paradigm for reflection upon the discrepancy between the lived actuality of identity and its disembodied inscriptions in official practices of identification.

Link to the work:

http://oicherman.com/katya/art/stories/

Katya Oicherman is a practicing artist, researcher and teacher. She has studied textile design in Israel, worked for a while in the textile industry and continued to post-graduate studies in Textiles in Goldsmiths College, London and Modern Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds. Currently she lives in Israel and exhibits internationally. She is a senior lecturer at the Textile Design Department of Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Israel, teaching textile design and history of craft. She works on a PhD thesis on Jewish ceremonial textiles in the context of contemporary textile practices in Goldsmiths College, University of London.