'The Floor Couldn't Hold A Home' was part of a collaborative exhibition by artists Noa Yekutieli, Maria Saleh Mahameed, and Tsibi Geva titled Another Language. Noa Yekutieli creates a quasi-domestic space installed inside a room, unfolding concurrent interior and exterior views while subverting and cracking everything marked as "homely". Yekutieli—the daughter of a Japanese mother and an Israeli father, who divides her time between the United States and Israel—grafts multicultural views on a reality of successive catastrophes. Implementing her artistic hallmark—manual paper-cutting—she creates meticulous panoramas, at once compressed and fragile, that combine natural scenes with man made destruction. Through these intense landscapes, she raises questions about mechanisms of denial and repression that serve man in situations of survival, examining the manner in which reality infiltrates our consciousness. In the current exhibition, Yekutieli presents an immersive house- installation with a cracked concrete floor; its central wall bears a paper cutout of a huge window, reflecting billowing sights of destruction, its walls are covered with temporary plaster and fixed with a gutter that emits paper clippings. The "house" further contains a bookshelf with a heap of rubble, and a paper cut out carpet bearing a landscape of remains, suspended on a portable clothes drying rack. We are faced with a house in ruins, and its title—The Ground Couldn't Hold a Home—refers to the imaginary and real registers of "being" and "stability". Visitors are invited to step on the floor, feel its cracks under their feet, and take a closer look at the perspective of destruction in the window. The condensed traumatic states in view of one's safe place collapsing, affects the ability to look at them head-on. - Excerpt of exhibition text by Dr. Irena Gordon

The Floor Couldn't Hold a Home, 2023, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Petach Tikva, Israel, June-October 2023