Golem Metamorphosis, Galerie Vernon. Prague
Superhero (Golem), Tina B. Festival, Prague, 2012
Curatur: Doron Polak (Israel) Projective - Artura Artists Museum
The soldier, the gutter rat, and the wandering Jew[1]
The Golem symbolizes the good and the evil in man; humanitarianism on the one hand but on the other – the nightmare that we could become. It all depends on our own free choice and judgment.
In this work of photography, Varda Carmeli expresses the Golem as a contemporary robot moving between wakefulness and sleep, between life and death. The Golem's space also moves between the private and the public space, marking covert borders. From behind reverberate sights from the past – or are they perchance heralds of the future?
"Truth" is virtually tattooed here in Carmeli's work. Not the 'Truth' engraved in the Maharal of Prague's Torah in the 16th century, but the Truth that the artist Varda Carmeli 'engraves' in her work of the 21st century as a mirror of reality.
The challenge for us is how to avoid turning ourselves into robots or becoming the victims of the robots we ourselves created.
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[1] According to the film Der Golem by the German director Paul Wegener, 1915
