Abraham Abraham and Sarah Sarah

Long before the dialogue around so-called religious practices became widespread, Marcel Mauss stated, “There is, in fact, no such essence or thing called Religion; there are only religious phenomena, more or less integrated into systems called religions, which have a defined historical existence, within groups of humans and at determined times.”1 1  - Marcel Mauss, Œuvres vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968), 93 (our translation). One could postulate that before being an ensemble of moral prescriptions, religion is an assemblage of facts and material phenomena, whose reality often eludes us in a context in which conservative or reactionary positions increasingly focus our attention on ideology and societal differences. Religion is concrete nevertheless, involving repeated gestures, bodily movements, and codified acts. 

In the installation Abraham Abraham Sarah Sarah, presented at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme in Paris and the Art Gallery of Alberta, Nira Pereg presents a comparative anthropological study of such automatic gestures. The two videos, shown face to face, portray the rituals enacted at one of the world’s most singular religious sites. Associated with both Judaism and Islam, this sacred place changes identity according to the needs and beliefs of the subjects who worship there. A mosque (Haram Ibrahim) for Muslims, and a synagogue and Cave of the Patriarchs for Jews, it is constructed on the burial chambers of Abraham, his wife Sarah, their son Isaac, and their grandson Jacob. Abraham is considered a patriarch or prophet by the three monotheistic religions. Located in Hebron in the West Bank, the site is also a focal point for questions of territory and ownership. During certain religious festivals, the building is reserved solely for one of the religious communities, to the exclusion of the other. After 1994, when twenty-nine Palestinians were massacred by an Israeli settler during Ramadan, the site was reorganized and placed under strict military control, with the introduction of separate entrances and steel doors. The Israeli army is constantly present, requisitioned to safeguard the site and to protect Jews from Muslims, and Muslims from Jews.