Or

Fine art print on rice paper, video (no sound, 11’), 15x220cm, 2025

OR explores the fragility of our efforts to understand one another and the tension between intelligibility and opacity as both an aesthetic and a moral problem. Through a radical process of translation of an ancient text centered on the word «or» (light), the work points to how attempts at clarification can generate rigid binaries and produce new forms of obscurity.

The work translates into hand-drawn, hieroglyphic emojis the first three pages of tractate Pesachim of the Babylonian Talmud, a text rooted in the remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt. This long Saboraic sugyiah revolves around a well-known legal formula concerning the search for leavened bread (“On the or of the fourteenth, one searches for leaven by candlelight”) and unfolds into a linguistic debate: does or mean day or night? The discussion opens a broader reflection on the ethics and aesthetics of how we speak to one another.