Elyahu Fatal (Eli Petel):
Broken Cisterns

“Broken Cisterns” was the first US solo show by Eliyahu Fatal (Eli Petel), one of the most significant artists working in Israel today. It reflected the artist’s incessant and complex interest in Jewish identity inside and outside of Israel while exploring Judaism as a religion, an ethnicity, a culture, a nationality, an aesthetic, a doctrine, a language, and an ethical code. The works directly confronted both spirituality and religion, as well as the social and personal questions related to inclusion in a spiritual world.

The exhibition featured paintings and installations extending an invitation to visit a site-specific work at the House of the Book (the Brandeis-Bardin campus). “Broken Cisterns” marked the first occasion he was showing under the name Eliyahu Fatal – Fatal being his family’s original Iraqi-Jewish last name before its  being distorted by the Israeli Zionist project.     

A series of large-scale colorful drawings (Untitled (Runoffs)) followed internal rules by which the lines, shapes, and colors had developed. The lines, drawn with a calligraphic movement, formed substances and containers, and spillages were amassing. 

Another form of containment appeared in a different work inhabiting the exhibition space – two freestanding pairs of jeans without bodies. A peek into the pants revealed a small video and sound work featuring the artist reading the 613 commandments (taryag mitzvot) of the Jewish tradition while jogging in Tel Aviv, in the dark, for 34 minutes. “You shall treat the stranger humanely; You shall fear God and not sin; You shall pray to God daily…” 

It was a trial of endurance, a series of constraints and releases, and as much as it invited a close and intimate inspection, it denied the viewer access to a frontal view. This work functioned in the exhibition  as a grounding element. It was a hyper-corporeal work erected in the midst of a whirlpool of swirling lines, airplane parts, and sound waves of spoken verses.