Laila Abd Elrazaq: ΑΩ

Laila Abd Elrazaq’s works interrogate identity, self-reflection, loyalty, and betrayal within contemporary media. She adopts multiple roles and identities, reflecting on how notions of loyalty and belonging are being redefined and challenged. Death, too, becomes a mutable concept in Israel, merging with life and transforming into a new status. These opposites, life and death, form the core of the exhibition Α Ω (Alpha and Omega), exploring beginnings and endings.

 

The exhibition presents video and text-based works. Its titular piece frames the funeral as rehearsal, not conclusion. The artist delivers a first-person, declarative text, shifting roles within the work. Beginning and end dissolve into a continuous present, death within life or life anticipating death, offering a strategy against being unprepared. Death here becomes a performance to be practiced, the funeral serves as documentation, not tragedy. Rehearsal insists on an active voice, rejecting inherited scripts of mourning. This approach arises in a context where death’s social and economic value is increasing, yet expressions of grief are suppressed.

 

Abd Elrazaq does not inhabit characters. The loss of identity does not hold her back, and she confidently navigates the absurd spaces of personal history and artistic heritage. The works do not hide the discomfort of self-reflection, expressed through loss and the search for meaning from within the space of survival marked by contradiction (that is to say, life goes on). Her work explores resilience, metamorphosis, and the tension between personal evolution and societal expectation.

 

“Alpha and Omega” is also the title of a well-known series of lithographs (1908–1909) by Edvard Munch, in which Adam and Eve are reimagined as primordial beings who fully enact all their drives and emotions. Although Alpha ultimately kills Omega at the end of Munch’s new Garden of Eden narrative, Omega’s offspring, born of her traitorous affairs with various animals, go on to fill the earth. A further, chaotic extension beyond Alpha and Omega enters the realm of contemporary media with the “Omegaverse” (α/β/Ω) - a term coined within the online fan fiction community, popularized on platforms like AO3 (formerly Wattpad), which categorizes social groups by hierarchical dominance and sexual drive.