Two Pieces

Stop motion animation, 00:03:00 min. The inspiration for this stop-motion work comes from a poem written in the 1930s by Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin, an immigrant who lived in New York. The animation takes its title from the first line of her poem: “My hands, two pieces of my body I am never ashamed of.” In the poem, her hands transform from familiar, everyday objects into uncanny objects of abject desire, shifting from a woman’s modest hands into sexualized men’s hands. In this work I explore foreignness and familiarity by delving into the experience of the body, sexual desire and the urban landscape. Using stop motion, the transformation of the image allows to infuse the still drawing with time and movement, a visual representation of the metamorphosis enacted in the poem.

sound: Ido Alhassid

Brooklyn museum, NYC 2024 14st Y theater, NYC, 2023 Stichting Murf/Murw, Tilburg, NL 2023