Video, 2024
Single channel, 5 minutes

KADDISH: THE BLACK CHAPTER

Kaddish: The Black Chapter, the second part of the trilogy Kaddish in Three Chapters, examines the emergence of language from a moment of rupture and trauma.

On an empty theater stage, the poet Erez Biton, recipient of the Israel Prize for Hebrew Literature and Poetry (2015), sits alongside the artist Omri Danino. The two are seated on plastic “Keter” chairs, a familiar Israeli object associated with mourning ceremonies and mass events.

Throughout the video, Danino whispers into Biton’s ear his poem Kaddish-Orphan-Language, a text written by Danino specifically for the piece, based on the Jewish Kaddish prayer. Biton repeats each word aloud, giving voice to the poem as it gradually comes to life.

The poem describes the evolution of language from trauma in four stages: gibberish, broken language, imitation, and free language. This process is embodied in the act of whispering and repetition: Danino whispers each word and Biton repeats it aloud, enacting both the fracture and the repair of language.

The empty hall signals the absence of the gaze, the blindness of the theatrical space. Biton’s blindness, directed straight at the camera, echoes this emptiness and emphasizes the traumatic moment as a point of origin, but also as the beginning of healing and repair.