Binds & Bonds: Symbolic Somatic Experience

Her installation, consisting of a collection of skeletons’ chairs bound and tied up in strings, invite the viewer into the artist’s process-centered approach to art making as a form of healing.

Rehavia’s repetitive construction process of tying and binding echoes the emotional processing of trauma that may be personal, social, and intergenerational.

By working through the effects of trauma within her own lived experience, Rehavia engages and deconstructs forms of symbolic violence through sculptural construction.

She communicates the psychological and social positions of being hampered, constrained, or frozen while acknowledging the wounded artist/healer and the art process as a traumatic growth.

"How can we build the bonds necessary to transform the binds that hold us back?"

- Dafna Rehavia

Dafna Rehavia is a feminist, activist, mixed media artist, and art therapist. She immigrated and lives in Pittsburgh via Tel Aviv.

In her exhibitions, she has explored existential and identity struggles from a personal and sociocultural view.