In her exhibition Cast-In-Doubt Miri Nishri creates a fictitious biography in three chapters.

In the first chapter Nishri outlines her daily existence: in aquarelle, ink and coffee she documents on translucent paper dozens of images of women in embryonic curl. Alone, at center frame, almost naked, the women float like a pupa seeking the right posture to emerge.

Like the fetus, the women are in a pivotal – optional state: between wakeful and wakening; between melancholy and delirium; between helplessness and vitality; between sexuality and death, all is possible. This image, started in the group exhibition I-Mahut curated by Nurit Tal-Tenne dealing with Post-Maternal depression, evolves here into a quiet, sensual dance on introspection and choice.

In the second chapter Nishri presents a reserved alternative to happiness. In paintings based on past photographs Nishri charges the present stress with idyllic memory of family bliss: a girl playing with colorful flowers as her father rests, a girl jumping into a water pool in front of an observant soldier, a strong manly father carrying his toddler son on his shoulders once in front and once in the back. The perfect family experience is charged with the deceitful conspiracy of the memory and the painting outlining the doubt. Therefore, lacking alternative or answer, Nishri turns to the third and last chapter of invention:

Mother carpet, father Picasso and Kafka as a husband are a natural instinct for Nishri. In processed photographs Nishri bestows upon herself a festive, glamorous, fantastic and renewed life as a response to the daily existential torture. Baby Nishri in a nineteenth century-like photograph*, exultant in the center and alone in the frame, hugged in the arms of a mother concealed behind a carpet.

Nishri in another childhood photograph hugged in the arms of Picasso – a spiritual father, vivacious, authoritative, and sensuous and a celebrity. Nishri the mother with her son and husband in the posture of the holy family, a divine haze engulfing the family cell pouring a fantastic light on the mother kissing her savior son. In another version of that same family Nishri replaces the original father with brilliant Kafka, mysterious and somber, thus bestowing sophisticated intellectual remedy upon it.

The contrast created by Nishri between the first and following chapters is so powerful, convincing and credible that it grants validity and significance to the fiction.

*Hidden mothers – during the nineteenth century, the duration of photographing babies exceeded their patience. Mothers would therefore hold them concealed behind a carpet, sheet or decorative cloth.

Miri Nishri – The Holy Family

Inside the cathedral-like space of the Jaffa based Zadik Gallery, Miri Nishri displays her “Holy Family” series, intertwined with secondary narratives. The glowing crystal of two parents embracing their newborn is set at the gallery’s “apsis”, branching out to “happy moments” and an all round chain of sketches portraying women in a fetal position. The happy moments portray a father with his child, while the mother is separate and self absorbed. But these seemingly harmonic moments, were, in fact, gathered by Nishri from different sources, out of a conscious practice of adoption and flexibility. Joseph the Carpenter was not Baby Jesus’ biological father either, claims Nishri, as she pastes her own portrait, as a child, on Pablo Picasso’s lap and adds the famous pigeon on his head – and there it is, a new Trinity: the Father, the Daughter and the Holy Spirit. Why not?

The family motif has been occupying Nishri’s works for a long period of time. In January 2000 she marked the beginning of the third millennium by generously distributing embryos (painted on bubble-wrap paper and packed in a wooden box) to 300 “men” across the globe, accompanied by the question: is this baby yours? The open offer to adopt the embryo challenged not only male paternity and men’s responsibility for their seeds’ dispersion, but also the purist concept of family, stressing, above anything else, the organic and genetic blood tie between its members. Nishri offers anyone to adopt a baby whose identity is uncertain, but is also willing, on her part, to join any family unit in any necessary role – the mother, the daughter or the wife. This sheds light on how, in a different version of the same photo of the Trinity mentioned above, Nishri replaced the face of her husband and father of her son with a portrait of Franz Kafka: Miri Nishri, in a maternity house dress-robe, and Kafka, the proud father holding the baby dressed in white, seem like a genuine family at the joyful moment of the first portrait with a newborn. In this act, Nishri not only created a new family for herself, but has also given Kafka, the man who broke his own engagement three times for fear of not living up to the harsh demands of married life, the desired status of a husband and father.

The fetal state, in Nishri’s own private mythology, is a symbol of potential and opportunity: adoption or abandonment may lead to blossoming or withering. The dialectics between passive and active, or sleep and wakefulness, are also implied by the duality of the materials used in the sketches, mixing between water colors and grainy coffee. The fetal-like women in Nishri’s sketches, floating in the see-through cloud of milky Meiller paper, are “lying in doubt”: half nude, tucked within themselves, their heads between their arms and knees held up to their stomachs – fantasising, dreaming, detaching. It is doubtful that female solidarity truly exists between them and it is unclear whether they represent a function or dysfunction. At a steady pace, Nishri unveils the female melancholy as an exhausting survival effort, but one holding within itself the potential of rejuvenating and rebooting.

—Tali Tamir​, March 2014