Danielle Fischer : You Promised Me

a Rainbow 

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The exhibition was first presented at the Dana Art Gallery, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai

Many of Danielle Fischer’s works portray scenes of escape, fleeing disaster, and searching for a new start. These echo the story of her mother’s family and their expulsion from Egypt in 1956, followed by their migration to Paris and eventually to Israel, a journey punctuated by many stops and transitions. The narrative of escape, wandering, and survival, which also characterizes countless other stories of migration and displacement, is a recurring theme in Fischer’s work, viewed through the lens of the woman’s experience in a patriarchal world.

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The exhibition “You Promised Me a Rainbow” was originally created for the Dana Art Gallery at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai in the Gaza envelope, where it was on view in the summer of 2023 – a few months before October 7. Ironically and symbolically, the exhibition explored themes of fleeing the threat of destruction and searching for shelter and a new home, as if foreshadowing what was to come. Indeed, while it represents the personal story of the artist’s mother, it is also the collective narrative that has shaped the kibbutz and the State of Israel since their inception, and even more so since the outbreak of the war. As its title suggests, it also echoes the biblical myth of the Great Flood.

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The exhibition brings together drawing and sculpture, the two- and three-dimensional, and interior and exterior spaces. Flat wooden sculptures of hunted animals and airborne arrows line the gallery walls. The charred-black animals evoke survivors of a fire, or perhaps the flat, shadowy silhouettes of ancient cave paintings. At the center of the space, we come across a landscape scene: a body of water, perhaps a spring, and a tree beside it, like an exotic desert fantasy of another life – an oasis that offers refuge and the possibility of restoration. However, the tree is in fact an uprooted, dead branch, and the floor of the pool of water is lined with a printed PVC sheet masquerading as living water. Through these material choices, Fischer perhaps suggests that any hope for reconstruction and salvation, the building of a new home, is inextricably bound to our connection to nature and its restoration. 

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On the other side of the gallery, across from the escape scene and the desert oasis, Fischer has constructed a wooden alcove simulating an intimate studio. This space features a desk and a three-panel window that opens like a triptych of a landscape painting, capturing the tension between the enclosed studio – an inner sanctuary of inspiration and creation – and the haunted, perilous outside world. The desk is covered with art supplies and artworks, colored pencils, and photographs of colorful light refractions. It seems that the artist is trying to create a complete, unbroken rainbow inside her studio, as if wishing to restore the divine promise held in the story of the Great Flood: an eternal covenant with God, and a vow never again to bring destruction upon the world despite humanity’s sins. Facing the flight and catastrophe implied in the exhibition, the artist wonders with defiance and pain, yet with a childlike innocence: where is the rainbow she was promised? Where is the life of peace and security it represents? In this futile attempt to conjure the elusive rainbow by herself, she clings to the promise of a serene life. Like the fleeing animals, she too escapes into the studio, looking for protection from the dangers of the outside world. With that, perhaps she offers art itself as a place of refuge, as the only true possibility of salvation.

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Curator: Ravit Harari