Elegy

Rose Pizam was a four-year-old girl murdered by her stepfather, at her mother’s behest. Yahav and Eden Gur – a brother and sister, aged five and four, were killed by their father as an act of vengeance against their mother. These two tragedies set in motion a years-long search for a way to approach this taboo subject. Elegy is the outcome of that journey.

Working through newspaper archives, an unbearable number of children killed by their parents were found, since 1946: in rage, in revenge, in the grip of depression or psychosis, to conceal a culturally forbidden pregnancy, out of pity, or for no discernible reason at all. The question arises as to how we – self-described as a welfare society – failed to reach them in time, to see them, and to save them.

Elegy remembers them. It gathers the mounting toll of the dead into view. For every news page reporting on a child killed by a parent, a grey muslin cloth was embroidered, following – by hand – the faint architecture of the layout and the punctuation of the tale it bore. These cloths are bound into a book of sorts, placed upon a broad grey cushion, inviting viewers to sit and remain for a while besides the dead children, even if the act of doing so is not immediately clear to them.