TAL AMITAI-LAVI

Between the “holy family” and the “bound family” is a safety belt and a slogan of the Ministry of Transportation: "We are a bound family." Amitai-Lavi attacks the question of the family—a central concept and taboo in Israeli society—on a uniquely direct level.
Amitai-Lavi moves around the “soft belly” of the family: the dinner table. She paints her helpless parents immersed in food: her father dips in a soup bowl, floating between parsley crumbs and positioned between precisely set cutlery, while her mother is immersed at the bottom of the bowl under a pile of spaghetti in tomato sauce.
Table manners and food contain the entire family metaphor: parental control, predator-prey relationships, and the potential for destruction lurking under the tablecloth. It reveals an inter-generational cannibalism and a power struggle.
In a Freudian-macabre spirit, Amitai-Lavi turns Goya’s mythological motif upside down, expressing aggressive impulses directed at the parents. On a typical middle-class Hebron marble slab, she paints scattered rice kernels spelling: “We turned out fucked.”
Ultimately, Amitai-Lavi confronts the myth of familial connection with games of chance. She views birth as random and arbitrary, untying the family’s “safety belt” to cast her own private lucky cards.