In works in felted wool, sawing and embroidery, Adva Drori sets-free the Queen’s feelings and dreams disregarding the King’s deaf ear.
Musician Etty Benzaken created a rich multi-faceted musical mosaic which serves as the soundtrack to the exhibition.

Taking advantage of Zadik’s chapel shaped gallery, Drori creates in her current exhibition a splendid palace of scarlet and crimson and at the same time a sanctuary for lovers, where whoever enters take off their shoes from their feet.
The powerful colors, the seemingly naïve images, the softness of the fabric, the majesty, deceive the spectator. They are not regal decorations but accounts of a figure’s tormenting journey to independence. In continuation of her previous exhibitions, where Drori referenced her challenging childhood in the Kibbutz and the painful existential experience, here, the Via-Dolorosa leads to salvation.
In her poem, The Queen Came to the King, Nurit Zarchi describes the queen’s journey to the king: she comes to him wishful and with anticipation exposing her dreams about their love, while he fixates on himself, time and again, like a foreign parallel line, a stranger in her world. The journey repeats itself until the queen realizes that their worlds are parallels that never meet.
In large works (4-8 Meters), Drori parades the queen for yet another independent move releasing her from her dependence on the king. Drori weaves the queen in white, as a bride in her Chuppah, bestowing upon her a crown and freedom.
Cruelty, arbitrary killing, cannibalism and reversal of states, heroic confrontation and finally the granting of the wish, are narrative characteristics of Grimm brothers’ tales influencing her work.
Drori too weaves a cruel tormented story, which as in fairytales has a happy ending. However, unlike the Bayeux tapestry, describing complete scenes from William the Conqueror’s road to the crown, Drori’s tapestry focuses on the image and its mood – and the spectator must envision the events.
The “Juniper tree” fable from which Drori draws inspiration begins with the mother’s death, the stepmother’s cruelty to the farmer’s orphan son until she finally slaughters him and serves him as a stew to her husband. Her daughter, his stepsister, assembles his bones into a sachet and buries them under the juniper tree. From it he emerges as a beautiful bird singing:

My mother, she killed me,
My father, he ate me,
My sister Marlene,
Gathered all my bones,
Tied them in a silken scarf,
Laid them beneath the juniper tree,
Tweet, tweet, what a beautiful bird am I.

Thus, the bird flies between countries singing her song until she reaches her home and becomes a boy again, living happily ever after with his step sister and his father the farmer (not before they kill the evil woman).
A similar metamorphosis occurs with Drori: a wounded hurting girl becomes a queen in love, heartbroken transforming into a freed ruler.

The felting process is actually a painting in sheep wool in a sculptural technique – the wool fibers consolidate into felt as a result of motion, heat and humidity.
Drori dedicates herself to the material, slicing, treading, piercing, watering it and moving on top of it.
Her physical wallowing in the fabric is an outcome of internal motion in a ritualistic rhythm, setting free her sadness, loneliness and the power of love.
The music and Benzaken’s voice, created as an inseparable element of the installation combine folk-song adaptations, texts from the poems “The Queen Came to the King”, “the Juniper tree”, and chess instructions form a precise, heart-moving soundtrack to Drori’s splendid palace.

Sound Installation: Etty BenZaken

Closing:​ 14.02.15