Lea Golda Holterman »
Orthodox Eros
The body is a temple
Exhibition: 20 Jun – 31 Jul 2009
DADA POST
Nordbahnstr. 10
13409 Berlin
Dada Post
Nordbahnstr. 10
13409 Berlin
+49 (0)30-51060224
info@dadapost.com
www.dadapost.com/
Thu-Sun 13-18
Dada Post is proud to present photographer and video artist Lea Golda Holterman's first solo exhibition in Berlin, entitled Orthodox Eros. Born in 1976 in Haifa, Israël, Holterman creates photographs that lure and provoke the viewer through a unique layering of Jewish philosophy Religious, historical, and artistic content. Orthodox Eros explores the themes of sensuality in Judaism trough Jewish men's sexuality. Hotelman's sensitive and skillful photographs of the clothing and rituals that lead Orthodox Jewish boys from baby into child and manhood make strong references to art history, from XVth century Dutch painting to the work of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. This results in a defamiliarization of the Jewish man's image and invites the viewer into the sensual Jewish symbolic world. According to orthodox Jewish religion, the body is the temple of one's soul. The body, and one's relationship to it, thus bears an essential social subtext. Orthodox Eros addresses the notion of the Jew as the "other" in an erotic sense and the ways in which holiness and sexuality complete each other in this subtext. The sensuality of Jewish spiritual practice is revealed through the body's expression. Orthodox Eros also features an installation of Holterman's videos, offering a more narrative perspective on the matter, with interviews of her subjects on topics pertaining to their portraits, their religion, and sexuality. These videos offer intimate and revealing insights about the men she has chosen to portray and their relationship to their faith, to their bodies, and even more intriguingly, to the artist herself.