A Place at Sea | Rina Buberoglu
Curator: Nurit Tal-Tenne
Maya Gallery, 5/10/23-28/10/23

Rina Buberoglu moves through different stations of time and place, creating an intimate space, both as a concrete life story, and as a tool for observing universal and transcendent meanings. In the corpus of her work, she turns a compassionate gaze towards refugees and those who have been expelled from their countries, who are tossed from side to side in a fragile boat on the boundless sea, pleading for mercy.

"I was born in Izmir, Turkey, on the shores of the Aegean Sea. Each year, during the summer months, my family and I lived by the sea. We spend long hours swimming and sitting on the beach, watching the water and listening to the waves. We immigrated to Israel when I was fifteen years old; from that moment on, I was filled with longing for the deep blues and turquoises of the numerous bays of the Aegean Sea.”

Rina strives to explore experiences, memories and insights through clay, color, textures, collage and rhythm. In her treatment of water sources, she uses an abstract and multi-layered language that is based on trial and error. Relating to material and psychic encounters as metaphysical experiences, she leads us, the viewers, to internal landscapes and areas of mystery. In this body of work, she holds onto the images of refugees and immigrants in their shaky boats, those who secretly flee their countries toward the unknown, seeking refuge in the breaking waves of the sea. In one painting, a black shadowed figure pushes a boat with a girl and the paper surface features blue sea lines and characters veiled in black; silk and parchment paper, sand, glass from broken bottles, rusty nails and pieces of cloth, are all evidence to story and memory.

The sea that leads to life and death is home to the great whales, who also appear in her work, condensed into the realm of the material. This underwater animal, humanely portrayed, is a witness who participates in and observes the events. The whale that accompanies man's deterministic journey is referenced in many different literary texts as well as other works; for example, it is mentioned in the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Jonah wants to escape the mission he has been tasked with; during his journey, he drowns in the sea and is swallowed by a whale. In his novel Leviathan, Paul Auster explores the relationship between chance and destiny, which can lead to ruin and destruction. In Moby Dick of Herman Melville, the whale is a metaphor for God and the forces of fate.

"My soul has been torn from me and I am bleeding
My heart it has been rent and I am crying
For the beauty around me pales and I am screaming
I am the last of the Great Whales and I am dying" (The Last Leviathan, Andy Barnes, 1986)

The artist writes, draws, folds, condenses and processes the personal and human experience, while at the same time relating to the current events of her life. She moves beyond her dialogue on paper and produces an additional study in clay reliefs. There, too, the artist's dialogue is with the sea. Alongside the distress that is reflected in these works, Rina seeks to create a space that also offers the possibility of grace, symbolized by the rose, among other images. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung claims that a rose symbolizes the perfection of the soul; therefore, in the painting entitled Ulfat and I at Wadi Siah, a huge rose appears in the center, and at the center of the rose is a portrait of the artist and her friend. The lower part features an illegible text, words written and then blotted out by water. The text functions as an image, containing words and sentences that have been taken apart and reassembled. Similarly, another work features a text inspired by 45 Mercy Street, a poem by Anne Sexton (1969).

“Dream, drilling in the marrow of bone, searching for mercy street, not there…and yet I know mercy street, I know it well. not there, where did you go, mercy street? whale-bone corset in a wash basin. walk, walk – inside out, walking and looking, this is no dream, went out on a brown paper ship, swim back and forth, I burnt old notebooks in the back garden, then, the rose."

Nurit Tal-Tenne