The work process of many of the artists participating in the exhibition began with a comprehensive and intensive tour of Mount Zion. During this tour, thoughts arose for Relli de Vries about the significance of artistic action in these charged sites. What does it mean to display a personal work of art at one of the exhibition sites? Moreover, what is her place as an Israeli artist on Mount Zion? For her, this thought connected to a larger question related to the presence of art in charged sites where repression, expulsion, and alienation have occurred. De Vries’s work seeks to present this dilemma.

The work is a kind of installation, a double confession chamber, and is built of several elements: a surface engraved with a topographic map, and a casting of a lion sitting on it. This is not a roaring lion, not the symbol of Jerusalem, not a powerful lion, and not the king of animals. It is a lion neutralized from the images forced on it—a lion cast from a familiar production pattern of lions as graceful gatekeepers and as decorations devoid of context.

Over the years, de Vries has been examining patterns of animals and plants, objects which humans have loaded with meanings and “exploited” as metaphors for creating identity, belonging, and ownership. She seeks to dismantle this burden of representation, release them, and return them to their original state. In doing so, she raises questions about the power charged in them and the need which that power fulfills.

In her work Cave Lion, the lion works as a weighing mechanism. At the front of the mechanism, the lion looks at us, gentle and soft, while weights are pulled and dragged from its back. It carries the burden of the layered history beneath it, the burden of images that have been assimilated into it.

The lion rests on an engraved surface depicting, among other things, the topography of Mount Zion. It stands on sites built on historical beliefs and stories for which no archaeological evidence has been found. The directions marked on the map also represent intent: Jewish prayers in the direction of the east, and Christian prayers in the direction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. De Vries sees the letter Tzaddik present on the map as a multitude of local representations: North (in Hebrew “tzafon”), IDF (in Hebrew “Tzahal”), Zion, and more. Nothing on the map is free and clear of meaning.

By placing the tender and gentle lion in the heart of Mount Zion, in the heart of Jerusalem, she asks us, as spectators, to confess: to look into its innocent eyes, to try and free it from the burden it carries, and to wonder whether it is possible to stop the chaotic drift in which we are all immersed—as believers, as appropriators, as chronic users of images. Is it possible to unravel history and allow the present to redraw it?

Curator: Rinat Edelstein