Orit Raff: Hunt-the-Slipper

Israeli artist Orit Raff presents two films in her second solo exhibition at the Hosfelt Gallery. The first film, “Hunt-the-Slipper,” revolves around the mistranslation of the children’s game, jeu du furet (game of the ferret). In the game, a child in the center of a circle of children attempts to locate a furry slipper that is passed behind their backs. In the film Raff juxtaposes an image of a weasel (i.e. ferret) snowy white with the exception of the very tip of its tail, camouflaged and running in a snowy landscape and a girl’s feet, clad in furry slippers, jumping in an empty room. Both images are caught in ambiguous uncertainty, endlessly circling, going nowhere, brilliantly illustrating the elusiveness of meaning referred to by Jacques Lacan in his use of the phrase ambiguite de furet.

Raff’s second film, “Palindrome,” portrays two repetitive images that in the end converge into one: a young girl in an igloo performing a Sisyphean task trying to warm herself and the igloo and a coyote running in a snowy landscape. As with the first film, Raff deliberately keeps meaning ambiguous and multifaceted. Both the weasel and coyote are highly evolved animals, and both are historically associated with mythic, supernatural powers. They inhabit with easy grace a pure and natural landscape, unlike the girl, who is relegated to futile endeavors in constrained environments.