upcoming exhibition: ruptures & repair

Sunday September 15th, 2024Sunday September 15th, 2024 derschmidt 360 Views

Revital Arbel is a surgeon, obstetrician, and artist. She performs pelvic reconstruction surgeries, repairs vulvar and vaginal tears and scarring, and creates new vaginas in Sexual reassignment surgeries. She also restores virginity as a life-saving procedure. She delivered hundreds of babies and mothers. She uses photography and embroidery to express her feelings and thoughts about her job and the injustice she observes in the hope of promoting a change. As a surgeon, Revital Arbel specializes in fusing, repairing and healing human ruptures. As an artist she has chosen to continue using needle and thread to generate intervention and repair.

“As an artist I use photography and embroidery to process and express my feelings and thoughts about the relationship between my profession and the world around me. I am in the process of creation. While I’m analyzing and while I’m an artist I’m engaged in creation, processes, thinking and turning ideas into action. Art is everything to me both when I am »working« (as a doctor) and when I am »creating« the two fields are parts of the same whole. There will be a correction for the injustices I encounter as part of my work as a doctor and as a woman. For me it is not a combination but the same »thing.«”

“My name is Revital Arbel and I am a gynecologist and a pelvic floor, vagina and vulva surgeon. I treat women of every kind imaginable, Israelis and Palestinians, secular and ultra-orthodox, women born in a female body and women born in a male body and men born in a female body and everything in between, women from here women from there, blue ID card, orange ID card, transit card, refugee card and those, well, statusless.
After literally thorough research on the subject, I come out with an unsurprising statement, everything is the same, there is no difference, the same pain, the same blood, the same meat, the same milk, under the sky and maybe beyond the clouds they are all the same and need more or less the same things. Food and water!”