"Werde ich zu einer Salzsäule" (Will I Become a Pillar of Salt) draws on the biblical story of Lot’s wife. According to Genesis 19:15–26, God decides to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. He instructs Lot and his family to flee without looking back. Lot’s wife turns toward the burning city and is transformed into a pillar of salt.

The sculptures are made from shirts collected in Leipzig or given to me by friends. I immersed the shirts in saltwater baths, allowing the solution to rise through the fabric by capillary action. As the water evaporated, salt crystals formed on the shirts. This process unfolded slowly. I began the first sculpture at the end of 2023.

Salt is a multivalent material with which I have worked before. The palm branches and salt-filled metal bowls build on “Milk and Honey”, a piece I first presented in 2021 as part of "Post-Documenta" (a project of HGB Leipzig and the Athens School of Fine Arts). The title of that earlier work refers to the biblical description of the Promised Land as a place of prosperity, abundance, and fertility. The honey mentioned in the Bible is understood today to be date syrup, or silan. I collected the palm branches from the neighborhood in Tel Aviv where my mother lives.

The whiteness of the salt evokes milk, but rather than nourishing, salt sterilizes and kills. It also evokes the ancient ritual of sowing salt and thistles in conquered cities' fields to render their land infertile forever.

The metal bowls contain salt that gradually corrodes them. Next to them, I placed a clay bowl that was fired in a bonfire. On it, I inscribed:

כמו מי מרזב אשר אינם סבים לאחור, כך בל תחזור האש למקום בערתה
כפי שכפות התמרים לא חוזרות אל החוטר, כך בל תחזור האש למקום בערתה

(Just as water from a drain does not turn back, so too the fire shall not return to the place of its burning! Just as the palm fronds do not return to the trunk, so too the fire shall not return to the place of its burning!) in Nathan Wasserman’s Hebrew translation.

The inscription was originally written in Akkadian, an ancient Semitic language, and dates to around 1400 BCE. It was discovered in Ugarit, a city associated with an ancient Canaanite culture that has since disappeared. The incantation was originally intended to ward off fever. Here, I use it to ward off the destructive and consuming fire of war.

We may not always recognize it, but disappearance is the eventual fate of all societies and cultures. We gather the fragments, collect the myths, and try to create some form of meaning amid all this madness.

The sculptures face a video installation: a three-channel triptych composed of footage sent by friends and family in Israel. To me, the Mediterranean is a place of longing but also a border and a barrier. The video fragments reach me as distorted and disintegrating messages from the home I left. The waves become a salt desert, yet they return insistently, again and again.