Uzi Amrani, Baptism by Fire: Toys of War
Post-trauma burst into the life of artist Uzi Amrani ten years after he completed his military service, when he was already married and a father. The resulting turmoil and need to cope fundamentally changed his life. Amrani found himself turning to the world of art, where he began to engage with the image of the soldier and to use IDF uniforms as raw material for his artistic work.
Amrani uses military uniforms, which serve as an unmistakable symbol of Israeli masculinity, to wrap childhood toys – ready-made objects that embody the absence of the body, a garment that has become a shell, the skin of the body, of a period. The result has a strange and annoying effect, a return of sorts to childhood playrooms with highly charged iconography, immediately familiar to all Israelis. This symbolism dictates the nature of the representation, which is fraught with ambivalence, not only due to the visual information conveyed to the viewer, including the objects, the technique and the material, but also due to the prior symbolic capital that viewers bring with them, which on the one hand is linked to these objects and on the other to the language and substance of the military. The combination of the two themes, the integration and crossing of images, creates a powerful visual result that deals a blow to the soft underbelly.
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