In her sculptural works, the artist continues to question our self-attribution of cultural identity and those identities placed on us by others. In the floor sculpture ‘Disillusionment’ (2021), the artist deconstructs cultural identity metaphors inspired by the field of botany. Fuchs creates concrete casts of the ‘Tzabar’ cactus plant. In Israel, ‘Tzabar’ is not only the name given to people who were born there after 1940 but is also a desert plant known for its resilience and is considered a metaphor for being ‘rooted to the native soil’. Michal Fuchs’ tzabar plants can’t stabilise themselves in the undersized flower pots and lie broken in fragments on the floor – the porous materiality of the concrete becoming visible at the fractured edges. Fuchs conveys the discourse of identity in a sensorial way through the use of this sparse material. 

Text: Curator Birgit Szepanski, of the exhibition Hiersein, Being here, להיות כאן in der Kommunale Galerie Berlin