Etti Abergel is an artist working out of the cleft between the two chambers of the heart, a split which can be described as the tension of cultural bifurcation, schizophrenic existence, and the tension between the public and internal domains. Abergel’s art is the documentation of a process undergone by a person as an individual involved in addressing the voice of the cultural hegemony, as a process undergone by a woman on the cusp of her existence as a painter, sculptor and performance artist striving towards the conceptual and the abstract, and between the artist as shaman who diverts the deep attentive listening to the encounter point between word, picture, and myth as a wound, and not only as a gift. Her art is the work of internal documentation, transformation of memory as a process undergone by the memory carrier who shared in internalizing the trauma both on the levels of her sensitive testimonies of the first and second generation of Mizrahi immigrants to Israel [Jews immigrating from Muslim countries], even though it is rooted in goodness and peace. Her extreme striving for understanding, abstraction, and transformation locates her work in the split between the universal structural trauma of existential shock and the acute particular trauma characterized by the specific burden of immigration. The power of the new language she creates grows out of the integration of the two, with the permanent sensation that the language of the abstraction, the delicate link between objects standing alone or in groups, is what restrains the chaotic abysses of the myth, memory, or sacredness, which each time undergo a transfiguration which creates them as a new monad or multiples.
Etti Abergel's oeuvre is an event in language, place and time. Her network of terms of immigration and trauma is the great matrix for the understanding of the major importance of the concept of domestication and settling in her private lexicon and unique art project.
Etti Abergel is an artist with a fierce urge for concentrated work which plumbs the depths of a particular theme and its problematic aspects. We can identify three dominant stages in her work, which lies in the sphere between installations and performance. The stages reflect the way in which her spiritual development as a human being who places her centers of feelers seeking out language for spiritual transformation, is tightly connected to her constant art process as a continuity of transformation of materials and language.
The stages in Etti's work are stages in the creation of an abstract language with its own internal logic which tames oceans of imagination and myths with which the viewer may not necessarily be familiar, but which nevertheless activate the observer’s entire being, thus the origin of Etti’s hypnotic power. She creates a world of linked inanimate objects creating language, presence, and a world, and clearly convey that they are linked to her mythopoesis.
Her work is likely to be described on the conceptual level as the activation of vectors on objects and the construction of a world, as her oeuvre has been moving along three developmental stages for the past 15 years, between the following vectors: 1) Splitting; 2) Linked multiples; and 3) Isolation.
The stage of splitting
Tension is embodied in the thin fault line between the study of art as an act of making present and inculcating a new language, and between the "ancient" language of home and seemingly of myth which remains behind. From this viewpoint, the study of art is not only the inculcation of a language, but is the creation of a context for placing two languages on a collision course. At the same time, within the endless depths of Abergel’s consciousness, she was constructing her own personal language, a subjective language containing her autobiographical experience. It is a third language, making present the conceptual and abstract, an act which in any case empties the vessels of their overload, their charge...but what we feel is that it is time that is being spilled. The tension between the two languages – the language inculcated by art education institutions, and the internal art language inculcated through the channels of memory, myth and community – leads to the establishment of a third autonomous space: a new language which bursts out, takes shape and is constantly forming. The ability to move between them is what creates the rectification in real life, from art into life.
The stage of the linked multiples
Signs which underwent a traumatic process of being broken, shattered, and dispersed now seek to re-organize themselves. Etti places them within a new language. This analysis of the material creates alienation in the viewer, forcing observers to contemplate the rhythm of the material as language. Her ability to discipline the object into a place that we will be forced to consider it a monad concentrating within itself and containing, with restraint, the tempestuous movement between concept and myth which may be identified simultaneously on several planes in Etti's work: art (her very ars poetica) language and trauma, space and time, nature and inanimate object (and more…)
Acute, structural trauma
In a very obvious way, the process which Etti Abergel presents is a process in which art is revealed as working through the trauma. However, what is most interesting about her work is that it is: it reports conceptually on what trauma is, what its stages are, and what is the objects’ mode of visibility. The work also describes the holes in the envelope of the traumatic consciousness, not limiting itself to referring to the trauma with such and such qualities, in other words, in Etti Abergel's effort to create a report on foreignness, refugeehood, alienation, domestication and wandering, through objects which have been transformed and transfigured, linked and deconstructed. Through the transformation of the familiar to the foreign and the foreign to the familiar, she creates an accounting of trauma as language, a report standing on its own proposing two simultaneous readings: the issue of structural existential shock as a type of universal trauma associated with being thrown into the world, and the issue of the acute shock linked strongly to her parents' immigration and the status of the Second Generation as carrier of memory, as witnesses. This is not a work of conscious protest on the issue of being Mizrahi. The internal logic of her act of making of art becomes clear only by following the poetics of her language. The impressive process of creating a language is laid bare in her works. However, even if as the saying goes, “An artist’s unconscious reflects the neurosis of the time,” in Etti's work, the play between the artist’s conscious and unconscious is this prism. This is perhaps the reason that the way in which the particular and the universal take hold in her work is so difficult to decode.
The third stage: Isolation
There is a strong feeling that after "testing the vessels" by constructing a split world, the schizoid gaze of the act of making art, comes the stage of expansion of consciousness of the creation of bundles, groups, or linked multiples. Now comes the stage of testing the repeated isolation of the components of the groups, like an examination if the components of the mythic picture can stand alone like an independent hieroglyph, i.e., as a closed monad or a painted letter. It's as if Etti Abergel is asking at this stage of her work, up to what point can I go back and deconstruct the language? To what point will it be possible to go wild then calm down again, to go from deconstruction to the wonderful constructions that she has installed in the past without going beyond the limits of meaninglessness, towards the loss and total deconstruction of the language?
In many senses, this triadic process reflects the closing of a circle. If the splitting at the foundational stages of the portrait of the artist as a young man expressed the reduction of the original "I" into one chamber, as it gave way to a second chamber into a new language, and if the second stage of Etti's work of the linked multiples, expressed her desire to unify the wide variety of objects (which in my opinion they belong to the first chamber, standing alone), in ways and forms, in conceptualizations and tactics (which in my opinion belong to the second chamber), with all of the above based on the absolute and total striving towards harmonies of music and movement in space, and concretizing of the integrative process, after all, it is in the third stage – the stage of isolation – in which the artist examines whether the tortured pairing, this transformation process between materials and forms, has led to a language of which each component standing alone is like a kind of hieroglyph, a unified mixture tightly compacted, made up of the primary meaning of the primary object.
The Hebrew word for "sign" or "letter" [of an alphabet] – ot - also means a letter within a word as well as a sign for action, the sign of a covenant, and also the mythical hieroglyph.
All of the particular sediment levels in Etti Abergel's biography as a human being and as a member of a community of memory are subject to her fierce urge as an artist to create a new language whose logos strives to contain the myth and make it possible, to report to us on trauma, crisis, and deconstruction as the language of a new creation.