2022

Tel Arad, Israel

Ongoing ritual film and photographic series

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Havayah Shlema is an ongoing ritual film and photographic series made at Tel Arad on the spring equinox of 2022. Tel Arad is an ancient temple site, once alive with prayer, later buried and forgotten. In that desert landscape I gathered a circle of pregnant women. I was pregnant too, with my daughter, Havayah. Together we held a ceremony to activate a prayer for world peace.
The work began on the day I learned I was pregnant, when I saw in my mind a circle of pregnant women with bare bellies, and knew it would be my next artwork. Through movement, presence and voice we opened a space where life, body and spirit could align. Three older women held the space around us.
Alongside the ritual I made a series of photographs of the women: their vulnerability, their openness, and the quiet force of life moving through them. The images also hold the spirit of the land, ancient, raw and timeless. Together they form an intimate archive of a moment suspended between worlds.
Three months later, in June 2022, the women and I gave birth to the babies who had been in our wombs while we filmed.
The title joins two names. Shlema, “whole” in Hebrew, is the spiritual name that came to me after a long inner journey of reclaiming my body as sacred. Havayah is my daughter’s name, and also means “being” or “existence.” The film stays intentionally unfinished. Its final form will appear only when the prayer it holds, for a peaceful world, becomes real.

 

Film: Bar Rahamim Ben Or  ·  Photography: Yasmin Hassidim  ·  In collaboration with: Bar Rahamim Ben Or, Alejandra Okret, Sharry Gal, Margalit Frydman, Eilat Sofer, Gilat Gerbi, Tehila Levi, Ruth Rafael